Orion (https://orionbrowser.com) is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, Linux, iPadOS and iOS that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions natively ⟩ including uBlock Origin.
We have no plans to drop extension support. Content blocking is a feature, not a loophole, and we think users should have full control over what runs in their browser.
I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.
You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:
* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation
* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.
* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.
I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.
“Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.“
This issue persists on other browsers with ad blocking extensions? Including on iOS with FF Focus enabled. Is there a browser+extension combination that does not have this issue
I don't know what uBO on FF is doing, but it seems like ages since I've been blocked for using it. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the sites I visit.
Some context that might explain (though not excuse) the situation: unlike browsers built on Chromium or Firefox/Gecko, Orion was built from scratch on top of WebKit. No fork, no upstream codebase to pull from. That means every feature, every integration, every compatibility shim is ours to build and maintain. Browsers that fork Chromium or Gecko inherit years of battle-tested extension support, rendering fixes, and platform work for free — we don’t.
On top of that, the macOS team is 3 people. About 70% of our engineering time goes to maintenance and keeping up with WebKit/OS updates, ~20% to third-party app compatibility (extensions like 1Password, ad blocking lists, etc.), and what’s left — maybe 10% — goes to community support, discussions, and new features combined. That’s why our changelogs look active but long-standing issues persist: we’re constantly triaging a backlog with thousands of entries and making painful priority calls every single day.
None of this is meant as an excuse. You’re right that stability matters, and the issues you describe are real. But this is the cost of building a genuine alternative to the browser market rather than shipping another Chromium or Gecko wrapper. We think that trade-off is worth it for users who want real engine diversity and full extension support without Google’s or Mozilla’s constraints.
That said, we can’t do it alone — that’s exactly why Orion+ exists. If you believe in what we’re building, subscribing is the most direct way to help us grow the team and get to that “Snow Leopard” moment faster.
We’re sorry for the rough edges. We know they’re there, and we’re working on it.
I really appreciate the reply, and all your work. The difficulty of what you're doing is not lost on me; I was honestly blown away that you all launched a browser project at all. I think it's vitally important that the web not become a monolith in terms of user agents (even if, alas, one single rendering engine takes all the market share) so kudos to you.
What about the glaring memory issues that is a pinned thread in your forum? It’s had one comment by a staff member over 5 or so months?
I loved Orion and have been using as a daily driver almost since day 1 including paying for it but now it’s completely unusable. I’ve since moved to Firefox.
The fact that a pinned thread was silent for months concerns me about the future of Orion. It honestly hurts to see.
Literally this. Every response initially was "we don't see that and we let it sit for weeks". Now there's just no response from devs. I was unable to browse past more than 1 or 2 pages before memory ballooned to 30gb.
Any idea if that browser will ever go open source? I don't mind flatpaks but would rather just have some of my tools installed on my distro (which can be monumental to maintain).
I am also strongly perturbed by the misrepresentation, especially with no real package support. An alpha flatpak that posts "coming soon" is a bad first impression.
We get this question a lot. Our CEO is clear about this: Our guiding principle isn’t about licensing models ... it’s about interoperability.
The original Unix philosophy (McIlroy, Ritchie, Thompson) says nothing about source code licensing. It’s about programs that do one thing well and work together through universal interfaces.
Open source is a distribution and licensing model; conflating it with software openness misrepresents those core tenets. Orion supports Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions, and standard web APIs — that’s interoperability in practice.
Sure, there's nothing wrong in pursuing a closed-source commercial business model. But you guys also said you won't collect any user data with the browser, and that may be true. And yet, you stopped offering offline installers, in lieu of online installers that can be used (in theory) to add persistent and unique ids, do data harvesting and dynamic / customised installations. That doesn't inspire trust to your pro-privacy claims.
Applying the 'one thing well' bumper sticker to a web browser, which does a million things in a mediocre fashion, is a bizarre take. Not only is that whole comparison inapplicable, it's orthagonal to the point. You can do 'one thing well' and open source the code too, but you're not, and this post does not explain why.
Why do you have quite a number of glaring UX issues? I want to love Orion, but even something as basic as the tabs theming is driving me away.
By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.
Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode
I recently needed to download Orion on a new computer and I couldnt find it in the AppStore.
No problem directly downloading from the source (arguably better cuz I can keep the installer) but is there a reason Apple isnt allowing Orion on the AppStore or was that a choice on Kagi's part?
For context, a small amount (~2% of subscription fees IIRC) goes to Yandex.
The CEO argues that their goal is to provide the best possible search, and that they remain impartial to geopolitical issues. Reducing the quality of their product to pick sides on political issues is not a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Whether or not you agree with this take, framing this as being supporters of the war in Ukraine is extremely dishonest.
And to be clear, while I understand their point, I generally don’t agree. All information comes in a political context. Choosing which information to favor is inextricably tied to political context. If I search for flat earth content, do you show the science? Do you show content that favors the flat earth model? Do you focus on the controversy itself? Those are inherently political choices whether or not you want them to be.
My Ad Limiter add-on is down to 19 users on Firefox. Used to be thousands.
It won't work on Chrome at all now. I'm shutting down SiteTruth, after almost 20 years.[1]
Fwiw, I've been using Firefox for 20+ years, I hate ads with passion and yet I never heard of your add-on until just now.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
I hate to be the guy to say this, but uBlockOrigin outcompeted you half a decade ago. It's the first extension Install on a fresh install and I have never heard of your extension or site.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.
The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.
True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).
went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years
on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily
thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
Maybe "wicked problem" is the new tech buzzword, but browsers certainly are one, and Mozilla messed it up. I blame Mitchell Baker for a big chunk. We don't need a new browser though. We need a new web.
As a user at least I have an option to use ublock origin extension in Firefox. So I'm somewhat grateful I can still browse the net peacefully and safely.
Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.
Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.
Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
I've used Firefox across devices, across the years. This just isn't my experience, at all, remotely. And I have had to use Chrome (now it is Edge) for many work functions, so I do have the A/B comparisons. I'm not doubting your experience, fine, but I also know I'm not "pretending" anything in my own experience.
doesn't happen in my case (OnePlus 15/Android 16, Firefox background usage allowed in some "smart" mode whatever that means, doesn't suck the battery in background although it's on most of the time).
I have better battery life on Furi FX1s than any of my Android devices (Pixel 6a, Fairphone 4). This is with closing applications when I no longer need them on all devices.
Anything to back those claims up? I use Firefox and didn't really notice this (although I am rarely on battery), and other than Google Meet making my machine throttle (and I blame that on Google not on Mozilla), I don't use Chrome for anything else for my browsing.
It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.
uBo is the only reason I find browsing the web at all tolerable anymore. As a test I turned it off to view this article and almost crashed my browser with a dozen auto play video ads
This would mean I would find the energy to get over anything that is holding me on chrome, like saved passwords etc.
I personally consider uBlock Origin as an Internet infrastructure component. I have no ... _no_ idea whatsoever how some people use the Internet without it.
It's quite possible that we're just not meant to view the web. Those companies that even maintain websites might intend for us to really view things on their phone app. The garbage you see on the website is then not just some parasitic draining of your spiritual health, but a disincentive designed to convince you to stop using the web altogether.
I just tested and apparently their site is extremely flaky. I tried for several minutes to get info but nothing except one time (changing store location, refreshing). Then it started working fine for a while, updating when I changed location. I cleared cookies out each time and that didn't cause/fix it. So it's not intentional to push you to the app, just a shit site (not just because of this issue, but its extreme slowness on mobile).
It doesn't have to be a deliberate decision by upper management with the express purpose of pushing you towards the app. That's quite unlikely, some flunky would have anonymously published the email or memo dictating that policy were it so.
But in the same way that an individual human might do something with a subconscious purpose and plausibly claim they weren't aware that's why they were doing the thing, so too can a organized group of people do something when it suits their collective purpose. The group drifts into a behavior which is advantageous, someone in upper management is pleased with it even though the drift wasn't steered, and encourages more of the same. As that process iterates, it becomes clear why they go in that direction all without some Senior VP telling everyone at a department-wide meeting to go in that direction.
Likely just terrible Indian outsourced development. Fetches the data via XHR, but hits a service that is flaky because of 5 years of A/B crap messing with it. Poor management, bad business stakeholders and crap developers. Welcome to the enterprise
uBlock Origin Lite with MV3 works perfectly fine on Chrome. I don't notice a difference to the classic uBlock Origin, it even has a element zapper nowadays.
Just remember that Google is essentially an advertising company and that they were always going to squeeze this opening closed as soon as they could get away with it.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Because Mozilla, at least from the outside appears to have been horribly mismanaged for the past 20-25 years and only survived because the ad money kept rolling in.
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
There is a meme that Google financially supports Firefox development as some soft of strategy whereby having an "alternative" to Chrome gives Google some sort of "protection"
This does not make any sense and there is zero evidence to support it
Firefox's value to Google could be as a source for browser development. As part of the agreement between Google and Mozilla, perhaps Google gets more than just search traffic from Firefox, perhaps it also gets collaboration with Mozilla on software development. There is a history of such collaboration. Google CEO did not want competition from Mozilla on a browser. Chrome was originally written by ex-Mozilla developers using components of Firefox^1
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
In this particular context there really isn't any difference. Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads, but their revenue is mostly supported by ad money from Google, and Google, being an ad giant, can simply cut that stream off. The common sentiment seems to be that this would spell a life and death situation for the company and for the browser as a whole, which essentially makes Firefox a hostage to the whims of an ideologically hostile corporate entity.
I wouldn't say so. They're not offering their cloud at the same scale other competitors. Not sure when the last was I saw advertising for unlike AWS, Azure.
Felt more like their cloud services were more of a side product for when "the cloud" was the trendy buzzword and a way to justify their infrastructure costs. That and keeping a leg in the egg & spoon race.
I'm with you on the first one and that's the closest reason why you could call Firefox payment "ad money". But the rest are not too strong. Google makes a lot of non-ad money too, even if it's a smaller portion than ads. You don't call airlines "banks" just because they make all of their money from currency-like "miles", and even fly at a loss [0].
What I want to say is that calling it "ad money" makes Firefox look bad when it shouldn't.
As in my reply further below, Q1 2026 you can see Google makes 70% of revenue from Ads, the non-ad money you refer to is only 1/3. But if you look at net income, 85% of the net income from Google comes from Services (including Ads).
The Airlines story is taken out of context and different from Google, Delta for example in the Q1 2026 filing you can see they have a revenue of $15.8bn, of which ticket sales is $10.7bn ! Loyalty program income is just $1bn. However the net income supports the story The Atlantic ran, which just means that out of the $1bn, they are getting more net income from their mileage programs, than income from out of $10.7bn ticket sales, because the operating expense of flying airplane is quite high from fuel, etc.
So on one side, Google has 70% revenue from Ads, and even more % if you count net income. On the other side, Airlines - like Delta - have 70% of their revenue from passenger, but relatively speaking less net income from ticket sales if you consider net income.
You are not comparing the same thing. If you just compare revenue, Airlines cannot be called Banks because they still make 70% of their revenue from passenger ticket sales, just as how Google is an Ad company because their main revenue is 70% ads!
If you compare net income, the airlines story can have an angle, but the Google story doesn't, because their net income from Ads is way higher!
When someone says that all money a company pays is "money from their main segment", that's intentionally misrepresenting. In this case what's important is what the money is for, not from. Calling it "Firefox had ad-money coming in" can only be bad faith, the usual social media rage bait.
Now everyone comes out of the woodwork with "well akshully" because there's an interpretation where they can plausibly claim "technically I'm right" despite knowing they are sending the wrong message.
Basketball player LeBron James made more money from endorsements than sports, gas stations make more money from selling coffee and food than gas, and fast-food giant McDonald's makes more money from rent than from fast-food. If you called a gas station "a grocery store" you'd be technically right but also practically and pointlessly wrong.
Well thought out commentary... Let's dig deeper and at least we make it more interesting conversation, not a blurb.
Wouldn't it be technically no because Google's revenue isn't 100% from ads? They're making almost $120bn from cloud, subscriptions and devices for example. It could be cloud money. And if Google gets ad money so whatever it pays becomes ad money, then it's ad money all the way down.
FYI last fiscal results from Q1 of Alphabet, Google Cloud made $20bn revenue Q1 2026, up from Q4 2025 of $17bn. It's a bit misleading to include "subscriptions, platforms, and devices" in cloud.
Q1 2026 Google's revenue totalled $109bn, of which $77bn is Ads, so 70% of its revenue is Ads. It's common knowledge that Google is an Ads company.
I googled the money they made from cloud, subscriptions, platforms, and devices, then approximated almost $120bn in a year. The precise number mattered less than the fact that it's a ton of it already, enough to cover a lot of payoffs.
> It's a bit misleading to include
I didn't "include in" anything, it was an enumeration of things that aren't ads. "Google makes $Q from X and Y", not from "X included in Y".
You found something that's technically correct (a clear enumeration and addition) to be misleading. I think you now accidentally understand what was my initial objection. A lot of other people in the thread don't because that's how social media works, they go with the prevailing opinion for the sweet sweet likes, or go against it and get squeezed out.
Making Firefox even less desirable by "googlifying" it pushes Firefox users away and kills its image of a viable competitor. That's exactly what Google is paying for.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
Copying Chrome at the expense of loosing even more of their user share has been Firefox's MO for the last decade. It doesn't have to make sense to be reality.
Absolutely there are forks, they are what I run. But the majority of the work on the foundations still come primarily from Mozilla.
My fear is that, let's say Mozilla falls or shrinks considerably. It would take only a few complex but rationalised technologies from Google via chrome for Firefox and it's derivatives to fall behind. It already feels like they are constantly chasing instead of innovating and it wouldn't take much for them to fall behind on even that.
Personally, when they killed of the Servo team, that was a sign of their future. It was the team that was prototyping new web technologies long before they were mainstream ready. A lot of their stuff had been deployed into the main releases to great effect. The huge performance jump when they switched to the Quantum rendering system on version 68+ was a lot of their work. Then a few years back Mozilla just killed it off. It basically said they don't want to consider future technologies they are happy following. I don't see Firefox going away anytime soon but I'm not sure what shape it will be in a decade.
I’m honestly not looking for an innovative browser. I’m looking for one that is auditable, reliable, and not fracking me for data.
I was also sad to see the servo team shut down and a lot of the Foundation decisions the last few years have caused me to raise an eyebrow, but ultimately I just want what I listed above.
It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.
If Mozilla operates from revenue derived from selling www traffic to an advertising company running a "search engine", then it is 100% possible and realistic that Mozilla's browser could be optimised for advertising
Mozilla literally advocates for an "online advertising ecosystem"
At present Firefox is designed to send search traffic to Google by default
Mozilla can only see its continued existence through support from advertising. It does not just partner with advertising compaines, it actually acquired an adtech company
Google has a history of "shaking the cushions" by targeting their advertising customers and Chrome. It's reasonable to forsee that they could also target the agreement with Mozilla, i.e., Firefox
Maybe Mozilla breaks its partnership with Google, who knows. But based on a long history of Mozilla advocacy for online ads and working with online advertising companies, it seems 100% committed to online advertising as a "business model" regardless of whether it partners with Google or another "search engine"
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster, another reason is edge workspaces feature, I've grown to like it, which seems to be some sort of chromium feature that everyone bakes in weird ways if at all, and I'm still running ublock origin on edge without any funky bypasses.
Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.
That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.
I'm hardcore FF, and it used to be a bit slower than Chrome, but nowadays the difference is barely noticeable. And on very large pages (e.g. big tables), Chrome is a lot slower than FF.
To access Edge Workspaces, you’ll need a desktop running Windows 10, Windows 11, or Mac OS, Microsoft Edge version 144 or later, and to be signed into Microsoft Edge with a Microsoft (MSA) account or Microsoft Entra ID / Azure Active Directory (AAD) account.[1]
> Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something.
This is rare in my experience. And most were fixed with an extension to change the user agent string. Or were for amusement and used a new Chrome feature. Or used a feature Mozilla rejected for security and there were alternatives.
Give Vivaldi a try. I used edge on windows and android ever since it started used chromium, and switched to Vivaldi on Linux and android 8 months ago. Generally quite happy with it - not really missing any features from edge.
There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
> It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?".
This is a non-issue, if the devtools is opened, checkbox for "disable cache" is is checked by default.
> When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
How can you be developing front-ends and not have the devtools open while doing your quick edit-test cycle?
Ctrl + shift + R would solve your second problem at all times.
And I don't think your first point is quantified correctly and I am sure there is no data to back it up. But I understand the appeal of trying to quantify your personal experience.
I can back up their first point a tiny bit with regards to canvas. The primary product of our company is heavily canvas-based so I’ve always noticed that canvas on Firefox on macs is slower than on Chrome but it used to be in the 2-3x range and nowadays is more in the 1.5x range. They’ve made great improvements and I’ve never noted anything close to 5-10x slowdowns.
On Windows Firefox and Chrome canvas has performed equally well at least for the past ten years. Got no data for linux tho.
Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?
I use Firefox for everything on Windows, macOS, and Android.
I do have to keep Chrome around on desktop due to VirusTotal + reCaptcha setup to be purposely onerous for non-Chrome users. I'll get caught in loops trying to scan files after only scanning a few where I'll get like 5 absurdly vague captchas in a row. You must solve all of them in a row or it starts over from the beginning. It does this even if I'm logged into Google, logged into VirusTotal, and have uBlock Origin disabled on VirusTotal.com. It appears to be by design. So, to ensure I get to scan all my PortableApps.com releases, I have to use Chrome.
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
I switched over to Edge from Firefox because it was simply much better at managing its memory on my laptop. With Firefox I had to be far more cautious about having too many things running at once. WSL2 would often be killed to free up memory.
Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
You need to click "highlight all" to highlight all occurrences. It's the checkbox to the right of the search box. If you enable it for the first time, you may need to hit enter in the search bar again for it to show up (it remembers the setting and works instantly the next search)
> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
Its not the tabs themselves crashing, its when firefox (or my pc as a whole - I'm a developer and its a frequent occurance) crashes, firefox isn't as good as chrome at remembering what tabs were previously open
I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
Are you really sure it’s not because of an add-on?
If I remember correctly, Mozilla has said that about 95% of all pages that don’t work aren’t due to Firefox, but to an add-on.
I use Firefox exclusively and don’t usually notice that pages don’t work. When that happens, as I said, it’s almost always an add-on that’s to blame. And I dont notice its buggy or laggy. So could be good check your addons next time.
Here are some cases where Firefox really sucks: some of them are specific CSS styles, some are downgraded features, and some of them I just don't know why. As I mentioned here, the ChatGPT web and Gemini web used to be very laggy for no reason—or maybe it was just a bug for me?
I don't think any of this is caused by add-ons, though.
But it's getting better, and most of those problems are just gone;
Same here, but when a site completely fails in Firefox I either A) use my phone because mobile Firefox occasionally works or B) use Ungoogled Chromium.
You can report websites that don't work, or block Firefox, to Mozilla at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers try to reach out to the website developers or ship site-specific workarounds in Firefox.
Not using many extensions on my case, but Google meet remains unusable for a long time, sound is horrible during meetings. Chrome on the other hand works fine
Because it works and I don't have any compelling issues that would cause me to switch. I switched to Brave a while back (cause built in ad blocking) and have been quite content with it.
This isn't the 90's anymore where browsers behave wildly differently for the same page content. If you're not using absolute, bleeding age web APIs, Firefox and Chrome work identically. In my experience, there are exactly 3 types of websites that work differently between Firefox and Chrome: The Toy Hobby Experiments (who are just demoing some bleeding-edge API feature), The Monopoly-Bootlicking Liars (who reject my request based on UserAgent string alone, and when I spoof a Chrome UA the site works perfectly), and the Evil Monopolist Themselves (a few of Google's own sites run notably slower on Firefox, most notably Google Cloud Console).
On mobile, Opera is the only usable browser. It supports text reflow on zoom, and also I can choose the download folder for each file. Allows me to keep porn and non-porn downloads separate.
I'd rather the code not be there at all, if they leave a toggle for it, they're likely to turn it on without my permission. Mozilla has little trust in my book after mr robot and their other nonsense.
Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.
only reason I can think of is synchronization among devices since you can't find same decent browser you could use on Android phone and desktop, Firefox ain't decent browser on neither of those, on desktop Vivaldi with customization and stability is superior, on Android Firefox actually ain't THAT bad since good browsers with extensions support are not that common, I would recommend Cromite, though there is also Helium and Ultimatum
Ok but if you use it only for testing, and not for your ‘real’ browsing, then probably the fact that they track what you are doing is not that important, even if it’s still a nuisance. Or not?
Yeah, pissing off the ecosystem is a great way to drive users to your competitors. Requiring users to manually install and update a popular extension is a subpar experience.
It seems they spent so much of their budget on the CEO's salary that they couldn't afford an extension review team.
Quoting open-paren comment (2024):
> As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve.
Even if their review is flawed with false positive rejections, you'd think they have checks to require approvals from up the chain for poster child extensions that without which FF would be nothing.
Why wouldn't someone anyone cobble together a v3 version between the uncertain future date in which v2 was deprecated and when it became unavailable. There appears to be no possible future in which google has better adblocking.
The UI is just better overall. Ever since Chrome came out with the "unified search bar" imho Firefox was behind in usability. Firefox just follows. Like recently didn't they add tab groups after Chrome implemented them?
Isn't Brave based on Chrome?
Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability. Whats the selling point of Brave? That it hides ads?
Safari's OK if you're on Mac. I'm on Windows 11. Chrome looks tight, the tabs look great, my bookmarks bar looks great and I can fit a ton of bookmark folders on there. Firefox looks worse in almost every way.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
I hope Firefox never drops MV2. I have a lot of other extensions that use it other than uBlock. Can't believe Google really went through with it. We are truly in the end times of "personal" computing, very sad to see :/
MV3 itself isn't what breaks uBlock Origin, it is the bundled removal of capabilities that Chrome decided to do. Firefox MV3 supports full WebRequest "scopes" while Chrome only supports declarativeNetRequest.
"We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately)."
Poor little Google doesn't have the resources to support mv2.
> we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately
I bet they ain’t found shit, or even looked. There was a time I would read that charitably because it was Google, but that time has long passed. That reads like a lie to justify their actions.
I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.
How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better.
Sure but even Vivaldi has a few C++ folks on the dev team, how many more is it to maintain an existing API to changes in the codebase, especially when any of the hard parts of that work only need be done once among all of the forks.
Even if they don't want to handle it directly, this is the kind of thing a single sponsor can pay Igalia for, who have shown the ability to make entire new Chromium subsystems like MathML. There is no shortage of C++ browser developers in the world to do maintenance work.
So, what's next?
Will Chrome ship with hard coded DNS, so that DNS based adblockers will stop working as well?
Where (and when) does my rights what to display on my devices end?
Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).
DoH is intended to be indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, if the application specifies a specific DoH server a DNS based ad block will not work.
Right now The ad companies have not really figured this out and DoH largely works like port 53 DNS did. But give it a few years. They will up their game and our ability to mitm our own dns queries will vanish. I will miss it.
And you can definitely mitm a non-configurable DoH resolver if you absolutely needed to do that, as long as you can add your own trusted CA on a device.
> Freedom of DNS choice has nothing to do with DoH
The attack vector that DoH offers is that data exfiltration companies will start shipping their own DNS resolver in javascript to work around DNS-based filtering. They can't do this with regular DNS because the network traffic can still be observed and blocked independently, but how will you block a browser from accessing specific https URLs without MITM'ing all traffic?
So yes, DoH does have something to do with DNS choice: it can completely subvert the OS-provided domain resolver service as well as the browser-configured one.
I guess I just missed that?!
I'm running a mix of Adguard and nextdns blockers on some of my mobile devices, and both are apparently handling the DoH issue for you; by just blanket blocking the resolvers and/or ports, to force a fallback....
I need a Beer.
MV3 is actually a faster but less capable version.
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
The uBlock Origin Lite FAQ said In general, uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules (see log of conversion for technical details).[1]
Normies don't care much about ads, trackers and all that nuisance. I find it astonishing when you see them dodging all that crap while browsing the Internet
I have been using UBlock Origin Lite on Chrome for a while, and while it's not perfect and needs a bit of manual tweaking here and there, it's been mostly good for me
It looks like crunch time is here.
Personaly I have never watched add's on the net, by useing alternative browsers for 99% of my time, doing things like downloading a browser to do online banking, and then uninstalling it.
Even as a child I didn't like advertisements, and have never owned a TV, for the simple reason that NO advertisement has ever shown me something I wanted, and could have.
I have learned to let the net do it's thing, and provide me with work making things that people want, or show a lead to
a product if I search (think~tractor part)
but the rest is alien and very unpleasant for me to encounter.
If they were willing to make exceptions then I would hope the list isn't closed. I view this as the best of the possible worlds not the best of all imaginable worlds.
They would add the most popular fork if uBlock Origin was abandoned is plausible. They would add a no reputation developer's proof of concept is unlikely I think.
I would recommend folks check out Helium (https://helium.computer) it’s fast, basically just ungoogled chromium, and has full support for ublock origin.
This meant they added to Blink all the Gecko features uBlock Origin used?[1] Or they said they could maintain MV2 after Google removed it fully? Or they supported it so far?
They said We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible. But other developers said this and meant they would support MV2 until Google removed it.
They bundle uBlock Origin into their Chromium fork, I expect that if it became too difficult to support the APIs needed on MV2, they'd integrate the features more directly into the browser.
Ungoogled Chromium (https://ungoogled-software.github.io/) will 99.9% likely patch MV2 back in if they remove it (as there's already support and they will never remove it) and Ungoogled Chromium based Helium (https://helium.computer/) even ships with uBlock Origin by default.
And then there's still Firefox and all of its forks.
Best of luck to Big Tech as people will move on elsewhere.
Yep, I remember seeing the headline. I clicked in, read the sub-head and first few sentences, hit the back button, and moved on, having duly noted the passing of one more milestone in Google's long descent. The reasons why it sucks, why they eventually did it and the vague, implausible PR justifications for doing it were all self-derivable from the headline and sub-head.
I doubt I missed anything of significant substance, but didn't want to assert factual knowledge, so I just linked the Wikipedia article (which I also didn't read into). Don't interpret my skipping the rumination step with excusing or dismissing Google's decline. I don't need to rubber-neck every step of a slow-mo, multi-year train wreck to lament that it happened and update my priors regarding Google.
Neat! I rate this sentence at 7/10 on my scale of shit American companies say. The top score is currently held by Palantir with their X bio "Software that dominates."
I use uBO lite with Safari on macOS/iOS and maybe I just don't know what I'm (not?) missing, but it seems fine? I rarely see ads. Is uBO lite for Chrome that much worse than uBO?
What about this (actively maintained) fork of uBO that polyfills some MV2 APIs to make uBO work as an MV3 extension:
https://github.com/r58playz/uBlock-mv3
Good! Give everyone the push they need to break the web homogeny of Chrome everywhere.
I'm tired of all the (mostly technical) people whining that they need Chrome, and only Chrome can browse the internet. Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work and conveniently "it was some time back and I don't remember the details".
I've been using FF since before it was called Firefox. In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox - online shopping, social media, banking, custom line-of-business internal apps, ERP apps... you name it.
And, TBH, if I did, I'd just visit that one site with Chrome, and still use FF daily.
But I'm wondering if you are doing something wrong. I just tried nebula in Firefox 151.0.3 and it works flawlessly. Full screen works, all buttons in the player work.
I also tried it on Firefox for Android and it works.
I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)
These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.
And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.
> Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.
There is no world in which browsing on Chrome with ads is faster than browsing on Firefox without ads.
> Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
Well, since moving from ads to no-ads results in roughly a 30% performance increase, you can expect Firefox with uBlock origin to beat out anything in Chrome.
> And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy.
> Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.
You've been arguing strongly (condescendingly, really) against people making (what you see as) uneducated claims about Firefox. Yet there you are, doing the same with Chrome.
Meta's ad manager breaks maybe once a year on Safari, so I have to boot up Chrome. Also recently there's been an odd bug on more than one sites (at least Zoho mail and, again, Meta) where the top 20 or so pixels are hidden behind the tab bar. Again works in Chrome. But mostly Safari has been fine.
I switched to FireFox like 8 years ago, but to be completely honest there are maybe 2-3 very important sites that straight up do not work for me at all with FireFox. Like, completely unusable, not just weird graphical issues.
YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling.
Unsure if its a Firefox bug, Google pushing nonsense or uBlock Origin but constantly the YouTube UI Lags, video playback buffers, freeze, etc. Some days its near unuseable on Firefox, but I push through.
> YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling
That's fully on Google. I use plenty of other streaming sites where Firefox handles full-screen video just fine. Coming from the web search company that penalizes the rest of the Internet for slow-loading pages, Youtube is basically an embarrassment and I'm convinced this is completely intentional.
It's gotten so bad that I don't even try to watch Youtube in-browser any more; when someone posts a link that I think might be worth the effort, it goes straight into youtube-dl and I'll watch it offline or not at all.
'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use. Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.
> 'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use.
These are very different experiences we have. I've been using FF on Linux and on Windows since before the first day I found Youtube, and have not yet had a period where it doesn't work.
It's not pretending when tens of thousands are browsing that self-same site just fine over the period you had problems.
I've used Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware and more. In none of them did I need to do anything specific to make FF work on youtube.
> Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.
What am I doing wrong? All the games I want to play just seem to work without issue, including new AAA titles, with exceptions for things that use kernel level anticheat that I wouldn't play anyway specifically because of that.
Arc Raiders, Helldivers 2, Factorio, etc just fine. I'm even involved in some alpha / beta testing for a couple of new games.
Just running fedora + proton (wine). I just use the regular steam client like anyone else.
- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.
- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google
That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.
this sounds like a weird driver issue. in 30 years of watching content on YouTube, I've never seen it stutter unless I was using some weird low power PC.
That's pretty okay spec laptop, stuttering happens only in YT on Firefox (even at 360p), never in chrome (even at 4k), or on any other site. Up to date Fedora, always recent kernels (happens on all), everything pretty much latest, symmetric 1Gbit Ethernet + fibre uplink, etc, etc.
If you'd look it up you could see its not a single person problem, it's seemingly random.
You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?
Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.
You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.
Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)
Chromium is technically faster but in practice it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an adblocker. Adblocking significantly lowers render and JS load and lessens memory pressure. It varies site to site, but keep in mind that ads have to be fetched and then displayed. That’s not free.
Firefox with uBlock origin is basically as fast as a web browser can get.
This can be done but it’s not sophisticated enough for many ads. Websites are smart and will smuggle ads through known-good domains that you can’t block. You really need to be able to navigate the dom and use JS heuristics to identify ads and popups.
Because it doesn’t work just as well, because the blocking is less dynamic and filter lists are more out of date. For simple ad blocking scenarios it’s fine, but it will actually miss some ads on some websites.
uBO lite struggles with dynamically inserted ads. I’m not sure if it works with YouTube midrolls, I haven’t tried it. I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine. And, maybe it’s improved by now.
> I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine.
What was not an intended use case for an ad blocker in your opinion? To block ads in video? Why?
I mean because paramount plus has an ad free tier, which I don’t pay for. In my mind adblockers are primarily a security and performance tool, not a tool to circumvent paying. That’s a nice side effect though.
IME, ads introduce a 30% or more performance penalty, the only way Chrome is "faster" is if you view ads on FF.
So, sure, if you don't want to block ads, Chrome just might be slightly faster. But the browser that never fetches ads in the first place is always going to be faster.
People are also too lazy to go vote and then cry when someone gets elected that they didn't want to. Sometimes participating in society means not always taking the easiest path.
It won't matter if dozens of nerds use Firefox, Chromium is just better in every way and that's the reason for it's popularity. No amount of "voting" will change that.
Manifest V3 doesn't prevent anyone from blocking ads, as proven by uBO Lite. And yet misinformation about MV3 takes place in every Chromium vs Firefox debate.
I'll take slower and safer anytime over the jungle of ads and the dangers it exposes users to. If something doesn't work properly on FF I open up Chrome, use the site and then close it.
And to be honest FF is working fine for me, haven't run into anything too slow to my taste so far.
The only reason I use Chrome is because its dev tools are better, and for whatever reason, webgl wigs out on Ubuntu 26.04 in Firefox. It's mostly the lag issue though...
IMHO it's quite brave that a Google employee working in that area would let his real name be published, and an illuminating view of how they (don't) think.
Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
>Other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Microsoft Edge could soon follow suit too. Although it is not specified, Edge began disabling uBlock Origin back in February
Yes they disabled the extension at one point if you had it installed, but it was 2 clicks to re-enable it. The edge extension store shows 14m active edge ublock origin users.
I am using the AdGuard for Windows method. Everything is filtered at network level using a local proxy. I don't need to waste my time anymore worrying about which browser ruins their extension API by following Google's nonsense.
The university I work at is heavily dependent on Google and its products, so I use Vivaldi for work. Otherwise, it's Firefox. I've been using it since the beginning and see no reason to change. If a site doesn't work with it, than I don't visit that site.
Wouldn't it be possible to write some kind of local proxy server with MITM for HTTPS that modifies scripts and supplies the missing functionality for ublock origin?
partially, but it couldn't replicate all functionally. A lot of uBO rules apply to elements on the DOM. Like hiding a div with ID "#ads". That div often isn't sent as pure HTML, but is instead added to the page via JS code executing. At the MITM-level you won't be able to have rules that apply to the rendered DOM.
That said, selector based ad-blocking is still supported in MV3. So might be possible to get most of the functionality with both a MITM-level blocker and an MV3 selector based blocker.
Opera was a strong contender to become my main browser (luckily firefox copied the most useful feature, it's vpn), if ublock is deactivated, I will let it go without a second look.
The solution then is to run the equivalent of a PiHole on your private network and then configure your portable devices to always use that PiHole as their DNS service via self hosted VPN
I'm only one person but that was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I no longer use any google software/services other than gmail and even that is just a spam folder at this point.
That change came after Google's changes around MV3 were released. I actively campaign against using Google anything at my job as well.
Yep the MV3 thing was my ticket out also here. And some benchmarks about firefox better memory usage. All their parlance about they "protecting us" is patronizing.
> Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
Switched back over to Firefox a few weeks ago, it's as pleasant as I remember it being.
Unfortunately sometimes my Intel Arc B580 has a driver quirk where all the windows freeze and unlike Chromium based browsers I can't open Task Manager and kill the GPU Process and have it restart and have everything keep working, but rather have to kill the whole browser and restart it and hope the tabs load back correctly - thankfully haven't had many issues with losing those (only once or twice in the past year, but those were fucking annoying).
Either way, I explored both Edge as my daily driver for a year or so and also Safari on my Mac - both are actually fine as far as the user experience is concerned, but in the end I still come back to Firefox. It's a browser, it doesn't feel user hostile, it does its job well enough. Also personally I like its devtools more.
Just about obligatory mention of Pale Moon here. Have had a relatively clean internet experience for years with the old Firefox uBlock extension in combination with eMatrix. *Includes a disclaimer because I don't use Youtube and other assorted "social" media websites.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
So, consider this a layman explanation of why this change is bad from someone who spends their time securing end-users.
This change is good for the majority of users, but is actually bad for large enterprise customers and highly-regulated customers. It puts more control and onus of responsibility on to Google, rather than the end-user. So, we will expect to see better enforcement of controls from Google for the lowest-hanging-fruit that some aspects of MV2 exposed.
What's that, you say? MV2 changes? Well there's 3 things.
1. Remote code execution. The ability for someone to just yeet commands into your browser. A little harder to do directly.. Still very possible, just with extra steps.
2. Removing the ability for extensions to access network requests directly, which is what adblockers often relied on. It also means malicious extensions could snoop on your requests. They still can, just with extra steps.
3. Background persistence, an extension could stay alive, maintain state, run timers, keep connections open, and coordinate across tabs. So this shuts off the "background persistence" piece -- but helps with ensuring better isolation. Still possible, but now requires yeeting your data to an external provider instead of keeping the state contained locally.
Those 3 changes are incredibly powerful, and will impact many, many Enterprise security tools. Tools that now instead will result in products like "Island Browser", and "Enterprise Chrome" being rolled out to supplement the functionality that MV2 gave us.
This change goes against the US and Australian government's hardening advice, and reduces the overall efficacy of security controls we're able to implement within our web browsers natively.
Here's the Australian Government's control relating to it:
> Control: ISM-1485; Revision: 1; Updated: Sep-21; Applicable: NC, OS, P, S, TS; Essential 8: ML1, ML2, ML3
> Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
And if you're wondering about what incentives there are that led to this change, you can read this letter written to the Chairman of the FTC by a US Senator back in 2020. This letter is linked to from the same CISA document I shared earlier.
You should read it in full, and consider what incentives the Senator was referring to -- and how they also apply in this scenario.
Those Enterprise Chrome products I mentioned earlier? Chrome's change has now put some of this functionality which was previously possible with an extension, behind the Enterprise Chrome Premium SKU: https://chromeenterprise.google/products/chrome-enterprise-p...
Yet another reason to also perform ad blocking at the network level (e.g. DNS). I’ve found AdGuard Home very easy to maintain. Using Firefox and Orion browsers too.
Actually the main killer feature of UbO for me is cosmetic filtering with element picker, if I wanted just any ad blocker I could use various browsers with built-in adblockers supporting lists.
His opinion is irrelevant. User experience is all that matters.
As a developer I've often built "inferior" versions of products for specific user groups. The product worked perfectly for those users, they saw no difference. Yet, when asked, I'd maintain that it's inferior because <technical reasons>. And you know what? We are both right.
You are saying that the author's opinion doesn't matter your singular experience is the only reasonable benchmark which seems less defensible. For practical quality we should also consider future resistance against anti adblocking something that the author is able to do unlike a user who just notices it hasn't failed yet.
Consider manifest v3 has a fixed block list that can only be updated with the extension and only with permission of the browser.
This feels more like a gradual tightening of extension APIs under Manifest V3 than a sudden “kill switch.” uBlock isn’t going away, but its capabilities are definitely being reshaped...
It's all an excuse to try to neuter adblockers. The push for killing MV2 was suspiciously accelerated at the same time that youtube started implementing much more invasive anti-adblock techniques that really needed a full content blocker support (at least until people found new clever workarounds).
PM of Orion here.
Orion (https://orionbrowser.com) is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, Linux, iPadOS and iOS that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions natively ⟩ including uBlock Origin.
We have no plans to drop extension support. Content blocking is a feature, not a loophole, and we think users should have full control over what runs in their browser.
I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.
You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:
* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation
* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.
* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.
I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.
“Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.“
This issue persists on other browsers with ad blocking extensions? Including on iOS with FF Focus enabled. Is there a browser+extension combination that does not have this issue
I don't know what uBO on FF is doing, but it seems like ages since I've been blocked for using it. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the sites I visit.
Kagi is the new arch Linux.
Thanks for the honest feedback, and I hear you.
Some context that might explain (though not excuse) the situation: unlike browsers built on Chromium or Firefox/Gecko, Orion was built from scratch on top of WebKit. No fork, no upstream codebase to pull from. That means every feature, every integration, every compatibility shim is ours to build and maintain. Browsers that fork Chromium or Gecko inherit years of battle-tested extension support, rendering fixes, and platform work for free — we don’t.
On top of that, the macOS team is 3 people. About 70% of our engineering time goes to maintenance and keeping up with WebKit/OS updates, ~20% to third-party app compatibility (extensions like 1Password, ad blocking lists, etc.), and what’s left — maybe 10% — goes to community support, discussions, and new features combined. That’s why our changelogs look active but long-standing issues persist: we’re constantly triaging a backlog with thousands of entries and making painful priority calls every single day.
None of this is meant as an excuse. You’re right that stability matters, and the issues you describe are real. But this is the cost of building a genuine alternative to the browser market rather than shipping another Chromium or Gecko wrapper. We think that trade-off is worth it for users who want real engine diversity and full extension support without Google’s or Mozilla’s constraints.
That said, we can’t do it alone — that’s exactly why Orion+ exists. If you believe in what we’re building, subscribing is the most direct way to help us grow the team and get to that “Snow Leopard” moment faster.
We’re sorry for the rough edges. We know they’re there, and we’re working on it.
I really appreciate the reply, and all your work. The difficulty of what you're doing is not lost on me; I was honestly blown away that you all launched a browser project at all. I think it's vitally important that the web not become a monolith in terms of user agents (even if, alas, one single rendering engine takes all the market share) so kudos to you.
What about the glaring memory issues that is a pinned thread in your forum? It’s had one comment by a staff member over 5 or so months?
I loved Orion and have been using as a daily driver almost since day 1 including paying for it but now it’s completely unusable. I’ve since moved to Firefox.
The fact that a pinned thread was silent for months concerns me about the future of Orion. It honestly hurts to see.
Literally this. Every response initially was "we don't see that and we let it sit for weeks". Now there's just no response from devs. I was unable to browse past more than 1 or 2 pages before memory ballooned to 30gb.
No, you don't support Linux. I just tried to download it and got a "coming soon". Please don't post misleading things to HN :(.
Kagi has a good rep; misleading comments like this hurts it.
> No, you don't support Linux
Here you go, official beta flatpak:
https://orionbrowser.com/download/oriongtk-early-beta
Any idea if that browser will ever go open source? I don't mind flatpaks but would rather just have some of my tools installed on my distro (which can be monumental to maintain).
They said the plan was they would if enough people paid for it to sustain development.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46554890
I am also strongly perturbed by the misrepresentation, especially with no real package support. An alpha flatpak that posts "coming soon" is a bad first impression.
While you can install the Firefox uBlock Origin extension in Orion on iOS, it doesn't block any ads.
This has been reported for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203237
Could you please clarify?
They can’t modify webkit on ios. They also don’t appear to contribute upstream. So it’s just not supported.
Exactly. And that is why I find the parent comment from the Orion PM misleading at best.
Because it sounds like uBlock Origin works on iOS, when in reality it doesn’t and probably won‘t in the forseeable future.
What does uBlock Origin say in response to this? They had a TestFlight debut but i dont know anything beyond that
uBlock Origin Lite had a TestFlight and now works fine as a Safari extension on iOS.
uBlock Origin never claimed their Firefox extension works in Orion. So I don't think they need to respond.
Origin and Origin Lite are by the same developer.
Well, yes. I never said otherwise. But he is not the one to respond.
Instead I'd like a reply from the Orion PM, because they are the ones throwing around seemingly misleading claims about their product.
I will consider Orion only when it is open source.
Yeah. At least Chromium is open source.
We get this question a lot. Our CEO is clear about this: Our guiding principle isn’t about licensing models ... it’s about interoperability.
The original Unix philosophy (McIlroy, Ritchie, Thompson) says nothing about source code licensing. It’s about programs that do one thing well and work together through universal interfaces.
Open source is a distribution and licensing model; conflating it with software openness misrepresents those core tenets. Orion supports Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions, and standard web APIs — that’s interoperability in practice.
That being said, the future is not written ;)
Sure, there's nothing wrong in pursuing a closed-source commercial business model. But you guys also said you won't collect any user data with the browser, and that may be true. And yet, you stopped offering offline installers, in lieu of online installers that can be used (in theory) to add persistent and unique ids, do data harvesting and dynamic / customised installations. That doesn't inspire trust to your pro-privacy claims.
Applying the 'one thing well' bumper sticker to a web browser, which does a million things in a mediocre fashion, is a bizarre take. Not only is that whole comparison inapplicable, it's orthagonal to the point. You can do 'one thing well' and open source the code too, but you're not, and this post does not explain why.
Why do you have quite a number of glaring UX issues? I want to love Orion, but even something as basic as the tabs theming is driving me away.
By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.
Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode
Happy Kagi customer here—I wish Orion was available on Android.
I recently needed to download Orion on a new computer and I couldnt find it in the AppStore.
No problem directly downloading from the source (arguably better cuz I can keep the installer) but is there a reason Apple isnt allowing Orion on the AppStore or was that a choice on Kagi's part?
Linux?
I can't find it in the downloads.
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For context, a small amount (~2% of subscription fees IIRC) goes to Yandex.
The CEO argues that their goal is to provide the best possible search, and that they remain impartial to geopolitical issues. Reducing the quality of their product to pick sides on political issues is not a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Whether or not you agree with this take, framing this as being supporters of the war in Ukraine is extremely dishonest.
And to be clear, while I understand their point, I generally don’t agree. All information comes in a political context. Choosing which information to favor is inextricably tied to political context. If I search for flat earth content, do you show the science? Do you show content that favors the flat earth model? Do you focus on the controversy itself? Those are inherently political choices whether or not you want them to be.
Are accuracy and relevance calculable?
Would Kagi be spending money on these partners if they weren’t relatively certain it was improving their product?
Look, we're having a good time on Firefox since November 9, 2004. Come join us!
My Ad Limiter add-on is down to 19 users on Firefox. Used to be thousands. It won't work on Chrome at all now. I'm shutting down SiteTruth, after almost 20 years.[1]
[1] https://www.sitetruth.com
Fwiw, I've been using Firefox for 20+ years, I hate ads with passion and yet I never heard of your add-on until just now.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
> I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin
Most likely AdBlock Plus. It was basically the standard until they started allowing advertisers to pay to not have their ads blocked.
I hate to be the guy to say this, but uBlockOrigin outcompeted you half a decade ago. It's the first extension Install on a fresh install and I have never heard of your extension or site.
or even since 2002 when it started as Phoenix
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
I use both daily and Chrome is still faster and more intuitive, which is unfortunate because I'd really like to degoogle.
Use Un-googled Chromium - https://ungoogled-software.github.io/about/ ... it's Chrome without the Google crap.
Will ublock work with this?
Last I remember, they were contemplating retaining MV2 too in future releases so that uBlock (and other extensions don't lose functionality) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/iss... ...
Right after they reach at least ~80% of customization Vivaldi offers!
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.
The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.
tabs also contain horizontal text
True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).
[dead]
went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years
on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily
Why not Vivaldi on android as well, and benefit from sync etc? That's what I've been doing for about 8 months now. Generally quite happy.
no extensions, cant live without uBlock Origin and few others
I use cromite also.Your old phone may work with version 138.0.7204.184 I believe uptown app store offers that version.
thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI
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Firefox did similar 10 years ago when they discontinued XPCOM and XUL
Was that the year they fired the Rust team to focus on paying their executives?
Let's not exchange crap behaviour. I think google would win hands down. Firefox at least has adblocking.
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
Let's be real. People love their shiny big brands, and will find any tiny excuse to keep using them.
Other way around isn't it? Google are the worst assholes for the time being so many as well go with the less bad assholes?
Maybe "wicked problem" is the new tech buzzword, but browsers certainly are one, and Mozilla messed it up. I blame Mitchell Baker for a big chunk. We don't need a new browser though. We need a new web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Not at all. Firefox is a trap to keep motivated people from banding together to create a real user-respecting alternative.
As a user at least I have an option to use ublock origin extension in Firefox. So I'm somewhat grateful I can still browse the net peacefully and safely.
That's exactly my point: You and many others accept a local optimum.
No it doesn't. Unlike Brave, Firefox needs an extension to block ads just like Chrome.
Yes, though it has the most powerful and customizable adblocker available.
Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.
Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
My Firefox currently has 33 tabs open (way more than usual). It opens in seconds on my 9 year old i7-7700k desktop.
I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
Firefox is only sluggish because Chrome uses your data to prefetch pages.
This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.
Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
I've used Firefox across devices, across the years. This just isn't my experience, at all, remotely. And I have had to use Chrome (now it is Edge) for many work functions, so I do have the A/B comparisons. I'm not doubting your experience, fine, but I also know I'm not "pretending" anything in my own experience.
Firefox on Android 16, it sucks the battery up in background mode (even with permission to use background turned off).
If I manually close it no issue.
I believe you.
I also do not, and have never, experienced this. I've been using Pixel phones since the 3a in 2019/2020.
doesn't happen in my case (OnePlus 15/Android 16, Firefox background usage allowed in some "smart" mode whatever that means, doesn't suck the battery in background although it's on most of the time).
Doesn't happen in my case, either. Pixel 9a, Android 16.
I have better battery life on Furi FX1s than any of my Android devices (Pixel 6a, Fairphone 4). This is with closing applications when I no longer need them on all devices.
Anything to back those claims up? I use Firefox and didn't really notice this (although I am rarely on battery), and other than Google Meet making my machine throttle (and I blame that on Google not on Mozilla), I don't use Chrome for anything else for my browsing.
ublock origin lite + adguard on safari are pretty decent.
yeah I love Firefox - but it takes a lot of memory + drains battery faster
I never went back to Firefox after they killed the Pimpzilla theme.
Conventionally, jokes not terminated with smileys aren't accepted on HN.
It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.
uBo is the only reason I find browsing the web at all tolerable anymore. As a test I turned it off to view this article and almost crashed my browser with a dozen auto play video ads This would mean I would find the energy to get over anything that is holding me on chrome, like saved passwords etc.
Agree. The web is literally unusable without uBlock Origin. It should be a standard browser feature at this point, like popup blockers.
I personally consider uBlock Origin as an Internet infrastructure component. I have no ... _no_ idea whatsoever how some people use the Internet without it.
In addition to uBlock Origin, I also have a few piholes (two locations), and I use NoScript as well. It's nice to have multiple layers of defense.
You are 100% correct and if uBlock Origin didn't exist I would dedicate my life to creating it.
it _is_ a browser feature for e.g. brave, vivaldi and (experimental, afair) firefox.
Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.
The difference is that the biggest popup offender was not the same company behind the browser everyone uses...
Just imagine if Netscape and MS made all their money from popups at the time.
It's quite possible that we're just not meant to view the web. Those companies that even maintain websites might intend for us to really view things on their phone app. The garbage you see on the website is then not just some parasitic draining of your spiritual health, but a disincentive designed to convince you to stop using the web altogether.
Like Home Depot not showing the item location in store from the website, only the app.
I only use the Home Depot website, and it shows the location for me. Maybe it’s regional or something
Yeah not sure what they're talking about, that's how I do it too
I just tested and apparently their site is extremely flaky. I tried for several minutes to get info but nothing except one time (changing store location, refreshing). Then it started working fine for a while, updating when I changed location. I cleared cookies out each time and that didn't cause/fix it. So it's not intentional to push you to the app, just a shit site (not just because of this issue, but its extreme slowness on mobile).
It doesn't have to be a deliberate decision by upper management with the express purpose of pushing you towards the app. That's quite unlikely, some flunky would have anonymously published the email or memo dictating that policy were it so.
But in the same way that an individual human might do something with a subconscious purpose and plausibly claim they weren't aware that's why they were doing the thing, so too can a organized group of people do something when it suits their collective purpose. The group drifts into a behavior which is advantageous, someone in upper management is pleased with it even though the drift wasn't steered, and encourages more of the same. As that process iterates, it becomes clear why they go in that direction all without some Senior VP telling everyone at a department-wide meeting to go in that direction.
Likely just terrible Indian outsourced development. Fetches the data via XHR, but hits a service that is flaky because of 5 years of A/B crap messing with it. Poor management, bad business stakeholders and crap developers. Welcome to the enterprise
Firefox thankfully offers sync and imports your Chrome data.
Makes switching easy.
uBlock Origin Lite with MV3 works perfectly fine on Chrome. I don't notice a difference to the classic uBlock Origin, it even has a element zapper nowadays.
It will work fine until Google and others stomp out all easy paths to smart, heuristic based ad blockers.
The ad folks don't work around ubo lite now, because they understand it drives people to ubo actual.
Once that option is not really reasonable for anybody not highly technical... That's when the fun begins.
Just remember that Google is essentially an advertising company and that they were always going to squeeze this opening closed as soon as they could get away with it.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future?
Because Mozilla, at least from the outside appears to have been horribly mismanaged for the past 20-25 years and only survived because the ad money kept rolling in.
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
There is a meme that Google financially supports Firefox development as some soft of strategy whereby having an "alternative" to Chrome gives Google some sort of "protection"
This does not make any sense and there is zero evidence to support it
Firefox's value to Google could be as a source for browser development. As part of the agreement between Google and Mozilla, perhaps Google gets more than just search traffic from Firefox, perhaps it also gets collaboration with Mozilla on software development. There is a history of such collaboration. Google CEO did not want competition from Mozilla on a browser. Chrome was originally written by ex-Mozilla developers using components of Firefox^1
1.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121018180015/https://www.compu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_(politics)#Controll...
> the ad money kept rolling in
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
In this particular context there really isn't any difference. Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads, but their revenue is mostly supported by ad money from Google, and Google, being an ad giant, can simply cut that stream off. The common sentiment seems to be that this would spell a life and death situation for the company and for the browser as a whole, which essentially makes Firefox a hostage to the whims of an ideologically hostile corporate entity.
> Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads
They weren't back then but are now: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/mozilla-anonym-raisi...
> Google, being an ad giant
Isn't Google also a cloud giant?
I wouldn't say so. They're not offering their cloud at the same scale other competitors. Not sure when the last was I saw advertising for unlike AWS, Azure.
Felt more like their cloud services were more of a side product for when "the cloud" was the trendy buzzword and a way to justify their infrastructure costs. That and keeping a leg in the egg & spoon race.
GCP is growing faster than either AWS or Azure, roughly 60% a year. AWS seems to have stagnated in growth. Azure is a clown car.
Still wouldn't touch GCP with a 10-foot pole.
Too much dependency in Google[0].
--
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396596
So your conclusion is based on advertising that you personally have noticed / haven't noticed?
While the nuance is important, money from Google is ad money:
So yes, Google gives Firefox money for political reasons. Made from ads, so they can sell ads, including to Firefox users.I'm with you on the first one and that's the closest reason why you could call Firefox payment "ad money". But the rest are not too strong. Google makes a lot of non-ad money too, even if it's a smaller portion than ads. You don't call airlines "banks" just because they make all of their money from currency-like "miles", and even fly at a loss [0].
What I want to say is that calling it "ad money" makes Firefox look bad when it shouldn't.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/airlines-b...
You're mis-representing things here.
As in my reply further below, Q1 2026 you can see Google makes 70% of revenue from Ads, the non-ad money you refer to is only 1/3. But if you look at net income, 85% of the net income from Google comes from Services (including Ads).
The Airlines story is taken out of context and different from Google, Delta for example in the Q1 2026 filing you can see they have a revenue of $15.8bn, of which ticket sales is $10.7bn ! Loyalty program income is just $1bn. However the net income supports the story The Atlantic ran, which just means that out of the $1bn, they are getting more net income from their mileage programs, than income from out of $10.7bn ticket sales, because the operating expense of flying airplane is quite high from fuel, etc.
So on one side, Google has 70% revenue from Ads, and even more % if you count net income. On the other side, Airlines - like Delta - have 70% of their revenue from passenger, but relatively speaking less net income from ticket sales if you consider net income.
You are not comparing the same thing. If you just compare revenue, Airlines cannot be called Banks because they still make 70% of their revenue from passenger ticket sales, just as how Google is an Ad company because their main revenue is 70% ads!
If you compare net income, the airlines story can have an angle, but the Google story doesn't, because their net income from Ads is way higher!
When someone says that all money a company pays is "money from their main segment", that's intentionally misrepresenting. In this case what's important is what the money is for, not from. Calling it "Firefox had ad-money coming in" can only be bad faith, the usual social media rage bait.
Now everyone comes out of the woodwork with "well akshully" because there's an interpretation where they can plausibly claim "technically I'm right" despite knowing they are sending the wrong message.
Basketball player LeBron James made more money from endorsements than sports, gas stations make more money from selling coffee and food than gas, and fast-food giant McDonald's makes more money from rent than from fast-food. If you called a gas station "a grocery store" you'd be technically right but also practically and pointlessly wrong.
It's a completely fair point.
You could say Google has two purposes of funding Firefox:
One is to inject search engine and ad distribution dominance into every known browser.
The other is to prop up Firefox as an alternative browser to avoid monopoly lawsuits.
They're not sponsoring Firefox out of goodness.
Which is why I don't like to be charitable with the interpretation.
Without the ads, there would be no payments to Mozilla. It's absolutely 100% unequivocably ad money.
Technically yes
Well thought out commentary... Let's dig deeper and at least we make it more interesting conversation, not a blurb.
Wouldn't it be technically no because Google's revenue isn't 100% from ads? They're making almost $120bn from cloud, subscriptions and devices for example. It could be cloud money. And if Google gets ad money so whatever it pays becomes ad money, then it's ad money all the way down.
Where did you get the $120bn figure?
FYI last fiscal results from Q1 of Alphabet, Google Cloud made $20bn revenue Q1 2026, up from Q4 2025 of $17bn. It's a bit misleading to include "subscriptions, platforms, and devices" in cloud.
Q1 2026 Google's revenue totalled $109bn, of which $77bn is Ads, so 70% of its revenue is Ads. It's common knowledge that Google is an Ads company.
> FYI last fiscal results from Q1
I googled the money they made from cloud, subscriptions, platforms, and devices, then approximated almost $120bn in a year. The precise number mattered less than the fact that it's a ton of it already, enough to cover a lot of payoffs.
> It's a bit misleading to include
I didn't "include in" anything, it was an enumeration of things that aren't ads. "Google makes $Q from X and Y", not from "X included in Y".
You found something that's technically correct (a clear enumeration and addition) to be misleading. I think you now accidentally understand what was my initial objection. A lot of other people in the thread don't because that's how social media works, they go with the prevailing opinion for the sweet sweet likes, or go against it and get squeezed out.
It doesn't matter what Google makes money from, it matters what they pay Mozilla for. And they pay Mozilla exclusively rev share on ads, nothing else.
> Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month
Yes. You can think of it like "blood money".
> Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future?
Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
I think Google will try to annoy Firefox users into using Chrome instead via things like needless captchas.
Things like https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/06/mozilla-firefox-android-... do not bode well either... :(
All the more reason to keep using Firefox.
Donate if you can!
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/
Donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support Firefox development. But payments for services to Mozilla Corporation do.[1]
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/
Those also don't go to just Firefox development but also to cushy executive salaries.
Last I heard was that there is no way to be sure that donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to Firefox.
They will do both. Firefox has zero leverage to do anything and is on life support with Google's money.
Making Firefox even less desirable by "googlifying" it pushes Firefox users away and kills its image of a viable competitor. That's exactly what Google is paying for.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
Copying Chrome at the expense of loosing even more of their user share has been Firefox's MO for the last decade. It doesn't have to make sense to be reality.
Firefox has around 2% share, it hasn't been a viable competitor for a long time.
Mozilla Foundation is more interested in spending money on anything else than making Firefox genuinely better.
If money gets short, the first thing they would cut would be a browser.
Good news is there are many viable Firefox forks currently and I’m sure some of them could take the wheel. It is open source, after all.
It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.
Absolutely there are forks, they are what I run. But the majority of the work on the foundations still come primarily from Mozilla.
My fear is that, let's say Mozilla falls or shrinks considerably. It would take only a few complex but rationalised technologies from Google via chrome for Firefox and it's derivatives to fall behind. It already feels like they are constantly chasing instead of innovating and it wouldn't take much for them to fall behind on even that.
Personally, when they killed of the Servo team, that was a sign of their future. It was the team that was prototyping new web technologies long before they were mainstream ready. A lot of their stuff had been deployed into the main releases to great effect. The huge performance jump when they switched to the Quantum rendering system on version 68+ was a lot of their work. Then a few years back Mozilla just killed it off. It basically said they don't want to consider future technologies they are happy following. I don't see Firefox going away anytime soon but I'm not sure what shape it will be in a decade.
I’m honestly not looking for an innovative browser. I’m looking for one that is auditable, reliable, and not fracking me for data.
I was also sad to see the servo team shut down and a lot of the Foundation decisions the last few years have caused me to raise an eyebrow, but ultimately I just want what I listed above.
It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.
> Ladybird browser might be our only hope
God help us.
Maybe after few another "we are switching from language X to language Y" blogposts.
If Mozilla operates from revenue derived from selling www traffic to an advertising company running a "search engine", then it is 100% possible and realistic that Mozilla's browser could be optimised for advertising
Mozilla literally advocates for an "online advertising ecosystem"
At present Firefox is designed to send search traffic to Google by default
Mozilla can only see its continued existence through support from advertising. It does not just partner with advertising compaines, it actually acquired an adtech company
Google has a history of "shaking the cushions" by targeting their advertising customers and Chrome. It's reasonable to forsee that they could also target the agreement with Mozilla, i.e., Firefox
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-found-a-sneaky-way-t...
https://nypost.com/2023/11/29/business/google-ad-chief-jerry...
Maybe Mozilla breaks its partnership with Google, who knows. But based on a long history of Mozilla advocacy for online ads and working with online advertising companies, it seems 100% committed to online advertising as a "business model" regardless of whether it partners with Google or another "search engine"
The thing is that they shouldn't be able to get away with it.
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Why are people on HN still using Chrome? (or Edge, or Opera…)
I don't, 99.9% of the time.
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster, another reason is edge workspaces feature, I've grown to like it, which seems to be some sort of chromium feature that everyone bakes in weird ways if at all, and I'm still running ublock origin on edge without any funky bypasses.
Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.
That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.
> Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster,
I'm skeptical; You're probably measuring Chromium + ads against FF + ads.
The only fair test is testing agains FF + uBlockOrigin. And there, FF wins hands down.
I'm hardcore FF, and it used to be a bit slower than Chrome, but nowadays the difference is barely noticeable. And on very large pages (e.g. big tables), Chrome is a lot slower than FF.
To access Edge Workspaces, you’ll need a desktop running Windows 10, Windows 11, or Mac OS, Microsoft Edge version 144 or later, and to be signed into Microsoft Edge with a Microsoft (MSA) account or Microsoft Entra ID / Azure Active Directory (AAD) account.[1]
> Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something.
This is rare in my experience. And most were fixed with an extension to change the user agent string. Or were for amusement and used a new Chrome feature. Or used a feature Mozilla rejected for security and there were alternatives.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/workspaces?for...
Give Vivaldi a try. I used edge on windows and android ever since it started used chromium, and switched to Vivaldi on Linux and android 8 months ago. Generally quite happy with it - not really missing any features from edge.
Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around.
It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.
Me too. Many government or banking sites only work properly on Chrome. Anything with Docusign is Chrome-only.
I use Docusign on Firefox, no problem.
Name and shame?
Apple. The school manager and business manager block Firefox users.
Netflix.
This is not true. I'm a Firefox user and it works perfectly fine in Firefox.
Windows or Linux?
You brought it up, you specify where it doesn't work.
Netflix doesn't serve maximum res for Linux and Firefox due to DRM related reasons. Chrome on Linux usually resolves or at least amends the issue.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-1080p...
Yes, but: "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."
Most of the extensions for Firefox say that. For some reason even 7TV has that badge.
for good reason. it's a serious security risk.
Check the code with AI?
All arbitrary Javascript is a "serious security risk" if you're reductive enough.
Mac
There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
> It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?".
This is a non-issue, if the devtools is opened, checkbox for "disable cache" is is checked by default.
> When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
How can you be developing front-ends and not have the devtools open while doing your quick edit-test cycle?
Ctrl + shift + R would solve your second problem at all times.
And I don't think your first point is quantified correctly and I am sure there is no data to back it up. But I understand the appeal of trying to quantify your personal experience.
I can back up their first point a tiny bit with regards to canvas. The primary product of our company is heavily canvas-based so I’ve always noticed that canvas on Firefox on macs is slower than on Chrome but it used to be in the 2-3x range and nowadays is more in the 1.5x range. They’ve made great improvements and I’ve never noted anything close to 5-10x slowdowns.
On Windows Firefox and Chrome canvas has performed equally well at least for the past ten years. Got no data for linux tho.
Yup, or open dev tools and enable "disable cache". This applies only while dev tools is open
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Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?
I'm betting there are a lot of people here using Chrome as their "daily driver".
To people who like Chrome, or some of its features (I love their bookmarks), I say: try Helium. Or Iridium. Or even Brave.
Which one isnt going to get unmaintained first.
Brave, then, I imagine.
I use Firefox for everything on Windows, macOS, and Android.
I do have to keep Chrome around on desktop due to VirusTotal + reCaptcha setup to be purposely onerous for non-Chrome users. I'll get caught in loops trying to scan files after only scanning a few where I'll get like 5 absurdly vague captchas in a row. You must solve all of them in a row or it starts over from the beginning. It does this even if I'm logged into Google, logged into VirusTotal, and have uBlock Origin disabled on VirusTotal.com. It appears to be by design. So, to ensure I get to scan all my PortableApps.com releases, I have to use Chrome.
That's pretty irrelevant isn't it? Shouldn't all users demand privacy, especially from ads?
All users should demand privacy, but they don’t.
Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.
Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
Brave has its own ad blocker engine built-in rather than as an extension, and it can reuse uBlock's lists
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.
Brave, like Vivaldi, I think, have developed their own ad blocker.
No idea if they will fight to keep UBlock Origin accessible or not.
I think and certainly hope that Helium will fight the good fight.
> Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?
They said they could offer limited MV2 support even after it’s fully removed from the upstream Chromium codebase.[1]
[1] https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
I switched over to Edge from Firefox because it was simply much better at managing its memory on my laptop. With Firefox I had to be far more cautious about having too many things running at once. WSL2 would often be killed to free up memory.
Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.
Locked down computers that still let you install extension.
For me the two reasons I can't live without are
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
Firefox has added highlighting of search terms in the page's scroll bar quite a few versions ago, if you want to give it another spin for that.
Weird, it still only highlights a single occurrence for me if I ctrl-f something, is there a setting for this or something?
You need to click "highlight all" to highlight all occurrences. It's the checkbox to the right of the search box. If you enable it for the first time, you may need to hit enter in the search bar again for it to show up (it remembers the setting and works instantly the next search)
Apparently I'm just a moron and have never seen it has settings in 10+ years. Thanks!
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Do these Firefox extensions help?
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
There's also Simple tab groups which allows creation of file backups at regular intervals https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
Thanks for this, I'll go have a look
> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
Its not the tabs themselves crashing, its when firefox (or my pc as a whole - I'm a developer and its a frequent occurance) crashes, firefox isn't as good as chrome at remembering what tabs were previously open
It's fast. All websites work. I like how it handles tabs and tab groups. uBO Lite is good enough for me.
I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
Are you really sure it’s not because of an add-on? If I remember correctly, Mozilla has said that about 95% of all pages that don’t work aren’t due to Firefox, but to an add-on. I use Firefox exclusively and don’t usually notice that pages don’t work. When that happens, as I said, it’s almost always an add-on that’s to blame. And I dont notice its buggy or laggy. So could be good check your addons next time.
Here are some cases where Firefox really sucks: some of them are specific CSS styles, some are downgraded features, and some of them I just don't know why. As I mentioned here, the ChatGPT web and Gemini web used to be very laggy for no reason—or maybe it was just a bug for me?
I don't think any of this is caused by add-ons, though.
But it's getting better, and most of those problems are just gone;
Still, I keep Chrome around just in case.
Same here, but when a site completely fails in Firefox I either A) use my phone because mobile Firefox occasionally works or B) use Ungoogled Chromium.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...
You can report websites that don't work, or block Firefox, to Mozilla at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers try to reach out to the website developers or ship site-specific workarounds in Firefox.
only site that was slow on firefox was google meet, but then it turned out someone documented how google had code to explicitly do that. ouch.
How many extensions do you use on laggy FF?
Not using many extensions on my case, but Google meet remains unusable for a long time, sound is horrible during meetings. Chrome on the other hand works fine
So use Chrome for Google services and Firefox for everything else?
Or... Don't use Google services.
Because it works and I don't have any compelling issues that would cause me to switch. I switched to Brave a while back (cause built in ad blocking) and have been quite content with it.
Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.
As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.
Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.
Self-fulfilling cycle.
This isn't the 90's anymore where browsers behave wildly differently for the same page content. If you're not using absolute, bleeding age web APIs, Firefox and Chrome work identically. In my experience, there are exactly 3 types of websites that work differently between Firefox and Chrome: The Toy Hobby Experiments (who are just demoing some bleeding-edge API feature), The Monopoly-Bootlicking Liars (who reject my request based on UserAgent string alone, and when I spoof a Chrome UA the site works perfectly), and the Evil Monopolist Themselves (a few of Google's own sites run notably slower on Firefox, most notably Google Cloud Console).
Weird how vmware console and my bank don’t support firefox.
Oh, and Microsoft Teams for a super long time (haven’t checked in a little while).
Theres dozens of examples tbh.
Teams has worked on Firefox (on Windows at least, haven't tried on Linux) since at least the beginning of the pandemic.
Can't speak to the other two. What does the console start screaming about when you try?
On mobile, Opera is the only usable browser. It supports text reflow on zoom, and also I can choose the download folder for each file. Allows me to keep porn and non-porn downloads separate.
Don't know, but I have uninstalled it a few minutes ago.
Find me a browser that doesn't have ai shoved into it... and no I don't mean 10 year old versions of iceweasel.
Firefox has a single switch to turn off all AI functionality. Does Chrome have it?
I'd rather the code not be there at all, if they leave a toggle for it, they're likely to turn it on without my permission. Mozilla has little trust in my book after mr robot and their other nonsense.
So you trust Google who is killing any protection from tracking but do not trust Mozilla that supports a strong protection?
I never said that I was a Chrome user, I said that I equally don't trust Mozilla.
> equally
Here comes the problem. I don't see how this is justified.
Work forces me to on the work laptop. But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else.
Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.
Even if you factor in all the ad bloat that uBlock lite can’t block?
Brave has built-in blocking, it's literally one of their main selling points.
I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.
only reason I can think of is synchronization among devices since you can't find same decent browser you could use on Android phone and desktop, Firefox ain't decent browser on neither of those, on desktop Vivaldi with customization and stability is superior, on Android Firefox actually ain't THAT bad since good browsers with extensions support are not that common, I would recommend Cromite, though there is also Helium and Ultimatum
Because they don't bother to learn the history, worse, they are also worshipping Electron crap, which is basically Chrome.
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly, so I have no complaints?
It doesn't protect from important tracking cases and will eventually allow ads, as the advertisers adjust: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Ex-bosses used it so had to test shit on them.
Ok but if you use it only for testing, and not for your ‘real’ browsing, then probably the fact that they track what you are doing is not that important, even if it’s still a nuisance. Or not?
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> Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later.
Source?
> Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.
It's unbanned; the author chose to not put it back. https://www.ghacks.net/2024/10/01/mozillas-massive-lapse-in-...
Yeah, pissing off the ecosystem is a great way to drive users to your competitors. Requiring users to manually install and update a popular extension is a subpar experience.
It seems they spent so much of their budget on the CEO's salary that they couldn't afford an extension review team.
Quoting open-paren comment (2024):
> As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710183
Even if their review is flawed with false positive rejections, you'd think they have checks to require approvals from up the chain for poster child extensions that without which FF would be nothing.
You confused uBlock Origin and uBlock Origin Lite seemingly.
There is currently no plan to deprecate V2 manifest in Firefox.
And Firefox version of V3 supports browser.webRequest blocking (the part that adblockers need to work properly)
> Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later.
Got a source for that, or is that just unfounded speculation?
Well given a long enough timeline, everything will be disabled at some point.
Why wouldn't someone anyone cobble together a v3 version between the uncertain future date in which v2 was deprecated and when it became unavailable. There appears to be no possible future in which google has better adblocking.
Because Chrome is the better browser, lelz.
I'll bite: why is it better? Did you try Safari or Firefox or Brave, and find deficiencies you can't live with?
The UI is just better overall. Ever since Chrome came out with the "unified search bar" imho Firefox was behind in usability. Firefox just follows. Like recently didn't they add tab groups after Chrome implemented them?
Isn't Brave based on Chrome?
Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability. Whats the selling point of Brave? That it hides ads?
Safari's OK if you're on Mac. I'm on Windows 11. Chrome looks tight, the tabs look great, my bookmarks bar looks great and I can fit a ton of bookmark folders on there. Firefox looks worse in almost every way.
> Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability.
As in: you don't care about your privacy?
I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
I hope Firefox never drops MV2. I have a lot of other extensions that use it other than uBlock. Can't believe Google really went through with it. We are truly in the end times of "personal" computing, very sad to see :/
MV3 itself isn't what breaks uBlock Origin, it is the bundled removal of capabilities that Chrome decided to do. Firefox MV3 supports full WebRequest "scopes" while Chrome only supports declarativeNetRequest.
"We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately)."
Poor little Google doesn't have the resources to support mv2.
> we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately
I bet they ain’t found shit, or even looked. There was a time I would read that charitably because it was Google, but that time has long passed. That reads like a lie to justify their actions.
I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.
They can only support MV2 extensions as long as Google continues to maintain them.
Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.
How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better.
Sure but even Vivaldi has a few C++ folks on the dev team, how many more is it to maintain an existing API to changes in the codebase, especially when any of the hard parts of that work only need be done once among all of the forks.
Even if they don't want to handle it directly, this is the kind of thing a single sponsor can pay Igalia for, who have shown the ability to make entire new Chromium subsystems like MathML. There is no shortage of C++ browser developers in the world to do maintenance work.
Can't Chromium-based browser developers work together to fork the entire thing? Ideally becoming independent of Google altogether.
It would be much spent and not much gained in their eyes.
Vivaldi said We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium.[1] They kept it before now because it was little effort.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
So, what's next? Will Chrome ship with hard coded DNS, so that DNS based adblockers will stop working as well? Where (and when) does my rights what to display on my devices end?
Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).
How does DoH remove any capabilities of what the resolver can respond to queries with? I block ads via a DoH resolver.
DoH is intended to be indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, if the application specifies a specific DoH server a DNS based ad block will not work.
Right now The ad companies have not really figured this out and DoH largely works like port 53 DNS did. But give it a few years. They will up their game and our ability to mitm our own dns queries will vanish. I will miss it.
Freedom of DNS choice has nothing to do with DoH.
And you can definitely mitm a non-configurable DoH resolver if you absolutely needed to do that, as long as you can add your own trusted CA on a device.
> Freedom of DNS choice has nothing to do with DoH
The attack vector that DoH offers is that data exfiltration companies will start shipping their own DNS resolver in javascript to work around DNS-based filtering. They can't do this with regular DNS because the network traffic can still be observed and blocked independently, but how will you block a browser from accessing specific https URLs without MITM'ing all traffic?
So yes, DoH does have something to do with DNS choice: it can completely subvert the OS-provided domain resolver service as well as the browser-configured one.
I guess I just missed that?! I'm running a mix of Adguard and nextdns blockers on some of my mobile devices, and both are apparently handling the DoH issue for you; by just blanket blocking the resolvers and/or ports, to force a fallback.... I need a Beer.
Don't worry. Once their telemetry shows that DoH is working for enough users they'll push to remove the fallback for security reasons.
> my rights
There's no such thing in the Google realm
AdGuard MV3 works fine. Still switch to FF if you can, more diversity in the ecosystem benefits everyone.
wasn't mv3 a dumbed down version? So it "does not work just fine" as some ads slip through?
MV3 is actually a faster but less capable version.
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
What ads are slipping through?
YouTube Ads.
I dropped Chrome about 2 years ago. FireFox does everything I need it to do and more.
>from our experience, uBO Lite does not seem to be as good as the original non-Lite version
In what way? I've never noticed a difference.
The uBlock Origin Lite FAQ said In general, uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules (see log of conversion for technical details).[1]
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Moved to Firefox. Thank you Firefox.
Finally Firefox will get a 30% usage share!
I'm confident that Mozilla corporate will find some way to self-sabotage before that happens.
That is my fear. Or get distracted on some ancillary product that takes resources away from FF development.
Just keep making a browser that isn’t shit. That’s your only job!
Normies don't care much about ads, trackers and all that nuisance. I find it astonishing when you see them dodging all that crap while browsing the Internet
Completely irrelevant news - switched to Zen Browser last year and never looking back.
(Cheeky phrasing, of course this is an anecdote. But for anyone the news is relevant to, definitely recommend a try!)
I have been using UBlock Origin Lite on Chrome for a while, and while it's not perfect and needs a bit of manual tweaking here and there, it's been mostly good for me
It looks like crunch time is here. Personaly I have never watched add's on the net, by useing alternative browsers for 99% of my time, doing things like downloading a browser to do online banking, and then uninstalling it. Even as a child I didn't like advertisements, and have never owned a TV, for the simple reason that NO advertisement has ever shown me something I wanted, and could have. I have learned to let the net do it's thing, and provide me with work making things that people want, or show a lead to a product if I search (think~tractor part) but the rest is alien and very unpleasant for me to encounter.
Here is the guy who builds the browser I use https://www.stoutner.com/about/
git https://gitweb.stoutner.com/?p=PrivacyBrowserAndroid.git;a=s...
download https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-android/changelog/
My browser combo: Firefox Developer Edition + uBo + Privacy Badger + Facebook Containers
One time setup, it’s synced to Mozilla account for later reinstalls
Caution?: mozilla sync doesn't guarantee storage space? They claim you need another instance running?
Does Brave track or does Brave fork on this?
It seems as if they will track it (https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/), with an exception for a selected few extensions (AdGuard AdBlocker, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix).
The few exceptions being the ones we want. So.. a good outcome.
We want forks or better extensions impossible?
If they were willing to make exceptions then I would hope the list isn't closed. I view this as the best of the possible worlds not the best of all imaginable worlds.
Perhaps good was overkill. Less bad?
They would add the most popular fork if uBlock Origin was abandoned is plausible. They would add a no reputation developer's proof of concept is unlikely I think.
I've found Brave's built in ad blocking to be good enough on its own.
I would recommend folks check out Helium (https://helium.computer) it’s fast, basically just ungoogled chromium, and has full support for ublock origin.
> full support for ublock origin
This meant they added to Blink all the Gecko features uBlock Origin used?[1] Or they said they could maintain MV2 after Google removed it fully? Or they supported it so far?
They said We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible. But other developers said this and meant they would support MV2 until Google removed it.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
They bundle uBlock Origin into their Chromium fork, I expect that if it became too difficult to support the APIs needed on MV2, they'd integrate the features more directly into the browser.
Ungoogled Chromium (https://ungoogled-software.github.io/) will 99.9% likely patch MV2 back in if they remove it (as there's already support and they will never remove it) and Ungoogled Chromium based Helium (https://helium.computer/) even ships with uBlock Origin by default.
And then there's still Firefox and all of its forks.
Best of luck to Big Tech as people will move on elsewhere.
Surprised they still have this page on their site:
> https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
> 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
Hah
> 6. You can make money without doing evil
implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?
you make some money without doing evil and some more in other ways
Technically, you can make money without doing evil.
I heard they actually changed to this wording from the original, which for a long time was "Don't be evil."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
You heard? It was a fairly big controversy when they did get around to removing it.
Yep, I remember seeing the headline. I clicked in, read the sub-head and first few sentences, hit the back button, and moved on, having duly noted the passing of one more milestone in Google's long descent. The reasons why it sucks, why they eventually did it and the vague, implausible PR justifications for doing it were all self-derivable from the headline and sub-head.
I doubt I missed anything of significant substance, but didn't want to assert factual knowledge, so I just linked the Wikipedia article (which I also didn't read into). Don't interpret my skipping the rumination step with excusing or dismissing Google's decline. I don't need to rubber-neck every step of a slow-mo, multi-year train wreck to lament that it happened and update my priors regarding Google.
Or obligation.
> You can make money without doing evil.
Neat! I rate this sentence at 7/10 on my scale of shit American companies say. The top score is currently held by Palantir with their X bio "Software that dominates."
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....
See if you can raise it as an issue. There's clearly a grave errors on the page.
I was thinking to cynically ask a Googler I know to raise an internal ticket. The new page could be just:
Google only moves fast and breaks things that matter.
Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.
Archive it before they memoryhole it.
Yeah I'd expect someone here will note it and page will get a "deserved" update
"You can make money without doing evil [but that's not what we do]"
What is evil about this?
I use uBO lite with Safari on macOS/iOS and maybe I just don't know what I'm (not?) missing, but it seems fine? I rarely see ads. Is uBO lite for Chrome that much worse than uBO?
What about this (actively maintained) fork of uBO that polyfills some MV2 APIs to make uBO work as an MV3 extension: https://github.com/r58playz/uBlock-mv3
Anyone tried that?
Good! Give everyone the push they need to break the web homogeny of Chrome everywhere.
I'm tired of all the (mostly technical) people whining that they need Chrome, and only Chrome can browse the internet. Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work and conveniently "it was some time back and I don't remember the details".
I've been using FF since before it was called Firefox. In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox - online shopping, social media, banking, custom line-of-business internal apps, ERP apps... you name it.
And, TBH, if I did, I'd just visit that one site with Chrome, and still use FF daily.
> In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox
I have. The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox. I normally end up using Safari for that particular site.
Additionally, lots of stuff doesn't work when Advanced Tracking Protection is on, enough that if I have any issues my first step is disabling that.
Did you ever click 'report broken website' button? It's there specifically for those cases.
where is this button?
In the hamburger menu
Fox years with no changes, seemingly.
> The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox.
Sounds more like a feature than a bug /s
I now daily drive firefox, there are unfortunately plently of broken sites. Nebula's video player is broken in widescreen for example.
Interesting. I also use Firefox and Nebula works fine for me. Do you have any extensions that may be causing that?
I keep firefox as a backup browser after more than 25y of on again off again use.
It simply does not work well on a lot of sites including government or bank websites. Wish it did.
But I'm wondering if you are doing something wrong. I just tried nebula in Firefox 151.0.3 and it works flawlessly. Full screen works, all buttons in the player work. I also tried it on Firefox for Android and it works.
Do you have any other websites that don't work?
Even on a blank profile.
A lot of web devs simply do not test on anything else, even for billion and trillion dollar companies, I've seen it first hand.
This includes a lot of state and federal government websites.
Note: I have said nothing about nebula, I don't even know what that is if it's not the network overlay.
https://nebula.defined.net/docs/
Probably referring to the content platform: https://nebula.tv/
Nope, literally used it last night. No problems.
For me it's speed.
I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)
These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.
And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.
> Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.
There is no world in which browsing on Chrome with ads is faster than browsing on Firefox without ads.
> Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
Well, since moving from ads to no-ads results in roughly a 30% performance increase, you can expect Firefox with uBlock origin to beat out anything in Chrome.
> And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy.
Agreed.
> Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.
You've been arguing strongly (condescendingly, really) against people making (what you see as) uneducated claims about Firefox. Yet there you are, doing the same with Chrome.
I really don't think so. Firefox performance is really that bad. I sadly had to stop using it.
> Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react
Are you opening "several windows with a dozen tabs each" in Chrome? If not, then it's hardly a fair comparison.
Absolutely. In fact I find I can use Chrome more heavily.
Sadly same here. firefox ran FoundryVTT poorly in the browser, like 12 fps, on Linux. Chromium had 0 issues with it, 60 no problem.
Meta's ad manager breaks maybe once a year on Safari, so I have to boot up Chrome. Also recently there's been an odd bug on more than one sites (at least Zoho mail and, again, Meta) where the top 20 or so pixels are hidden behind the tab bar. Again works in Chrome. But mostly Safari has been fine.
I switched to FireFox like 8 years ago, but to be completely honest there are maybe 2-3 very important sites that straight up do not work for me at all with FireFox. Like, completely unusable, not just weird graphical issues.
Such as?
YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling.
Unsure if its a Firefox bug, Google pushing nonsense or uBlock Origin but constantly the YouTube UI Lags, video playback buffers, freeze, etc. Some days its near unuseable on Firefox, but I push through.
> YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling
That's fully on Google. I use plenty of other streaming sites where Firefox handles full-screen video just fine. Coming from the web search company that penalizes the rest of the Internet for slow-loading pages, Youtube is basically an embarrassment and I'm convinced this is completely intentional.
It's gotten so bad that I don't even try to watch Youtube in-browser any more; when someone posts a link that I think might be worth the effort, it goes straight into youtube-dl and I'll watch it offline or not at all.
accuweather.com was the biggest one, though it looks like they fixed it sometime in the last month.
I used accuweather.com in Firefox a bunch a decade ago. Did not have problems.
It was specifically broken like 4~ years ago and fixed within the last month or so.
'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use. Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.
> 'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use.
These are very different experiences we have. I've been using FF on Linux and on Windows since before the first day I found Youtube, and have not yet had a period where it doesn't work.
It's not pretending when tens of thousands are browsing that self-same site just fine over the period you had problems.
I've used Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware and more. In none of them did I need to do anything specific to make FF work on youtube.
Google makes google-owned properties perform worse on Firefox on purpose and you fell for it.
> Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.
What am I doing wrong? All the games I want to play just seem to work without issue, including new AAA titles, with exceptions for things that use kernel level anticheat that I wouldn't play anyway specifically because of that.
Arc Raiders, Helldivers 2, Factorio, etc just fine. I'm even involved in some alpha / beta testing for a couple of new games.
Just running fedora + proton (wine). I just use the regular steam client like anyone else.
> whining
- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.
- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google
That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.
> - Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable.
I'm literally watching Lowko videos right now, on a computer made in maybe 2010, running Linux Mint and FF.
Just look it up :))))
this sounds like a weird driver issue. in 30 years of watching content on YouTube, I've never seen it stutter unless I was using some weird low power PC.
That's pretty okay spec laptop, stuttering happens only in YT on Firefox (even at 360p), never in chrome (even at 4k), or on any other site. Up to date Fedora, always recent kernels (happens on all), everything pretty much latest, symmetric 1Gbit Ethernet + fibre uplink, etc, etc.
If you'd look it up you could see its not a single person problem, it's seemingly random.
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The only negative experience I've had is with google sites.
No.
You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?
Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.
You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.
Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)
Chromium is technically faster but in practice it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an adblocker. Adblocking significantly lowers render and JS load and lessens memory pressure. It varies site to site, but keep in mind that ads have to be fetched and then displayed. That’s not free.
Firefox with uBlock origin is basically as fast as a web browser can get.
> It varies site to site, but keep in mind that ads have to be fetched and then displayed. That’s not free.
Move your ad blocking to a different layer. Like say, network level.
This can be done but it’s not sophisticated enough for many ads. Websites are smart and will smuggle ads through known-good domains that you can’t block. You really need to be able to navigate the dom and use JS heuristics to identify ads and popups.
You could, but at the very least you'd need to MITM all HTTPS, and that means installing your own CA on all devices
uBO Lite exists and blocks ads just as well as uBO. Why do people pretend it doesn't exist?
Because it doesn’t work just as well, because the blocking is less dynamic and filter lists are more out of date. For simple ad blocking scenarios it’s fine, but it will actually miss some ads on some websites.
I've yet to see any ads on uBO Lite so I'll assume it's false, unless you give an example
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474710
uBO lite struggles with dynamically inserted ads. I’m not sure if it works with YouTube midrolls, I haven’t tried it. I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine. And, maybe it’s improved by now.
> I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine.
What was not an intended use case for an ad blocker in your opinion? To block ads in video? Why?
I mean because paramount plus has an ad free tier, which I don’t pay for. In my mind adblockers are primarily a security and performance tool, not a tool to circumvent paying. That’s a nice side effect though.
> Firefox is slower than Chromium,
IME, ads introduce a 30% or more performance penalty, the only way Chrome is "faster" is if you view ads on FF.
So, sure, if you don't want to block ads, Chrome just might be slightly faster. But the browser that never fetches ads in the first place is always going to be faster.
For some bizarre reason you think that you can't block ads on Chromium. uBO Lite exists and blocks ads just as well as uBO.
People are also too lazy to go vote and then cry when someone gets elected that they didn't want to. Sometimes participating in society means not always taking the easiest path.
It won't matter if dozens of nerds use Firefox, Chromium is just better in every way and that's the reason for it's popularity. No amount of "voting" will change that.
Manifest V3 doesn't prevent anyone from blocking ads, as proven by uBO Lite. And yet misinformation about MV3 takes place in every Chromium vs Firefox debate.
I'll take slower and safer anytime over the jungle of ads and the dangers it exposes users to. If something doesn't work properly on FF I open up Chrome, use the site and then close it.
And to be honest FF is working fine for me, haven't run into anything too slow to my taste so far.
That sounds like the apple fanboys "but it just works, why wouldn't I like a monopoly"
The only reason I use Chrome is because its dev tools are better, and for whatever reason, webgl wigs out on Ubuntu 26.04 in Firefox. It's mostly the lag issue though...
IMHO it's quite brave that a Google employee working in that area would let his real name be published, and an illuminating view of how they (don't) think.
Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
A browser engine maintained by AI with less human oversight sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I wonder if Edge will follow suit, it will be an odd world if MS ends up being the good guy for once.
>Other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Microsoft Edge could soon follow suit too. Although it is not specified, Edge began disabling uBlock Origin back in February
Cmon, it's in the article.
I read the article.
"could soon" is meaningless
Yes they disabled the extension at one point if you had it installed, but it was 2 clicks to re-enable it. The edge extension store shows 14m active edge ublock origin users.
I am using the AdGuard for Windows method. Everything is filtered at network level using a local proxy. I don't need to waste my time anymore worrying about which browser ruins their extension API by following Google's nonsense.
The year is 2030. Content's been blocked by age verification and overreach, but the ads still remain.
The university I work at is heavily dependent on Google and its products, so I use Vivaldi for work. Otherwise, it's Firefox. I've been using it since the beginning and see no reason to change. If a site doesn't work with it, than I don't visit that site.
This headline ("looking to") seems to soften the previous headlines I've seen about this. Is this a proclamation or a public negotiation???
Wouldn't it be possible to write some kind of local proxy server with MITM for HTTPS that modifies scripts and supplies the missing functionality for ublock origin?
I thought the AdGuard folks were looking doing just that!
partially, but it couldn't replicate all functionally. A lot of uBO rules apply to elements on the DOM. Like hiding a div with ID "#ads". That div often isn't sent as pure HTML, but is instead added to the page via JS code executing. At the MITM-level you won't be able to have rules that apply to the rendered DOM.
That said, selector based ad-blocking is still supported in MV3. So might be possible to get most of the functionality with both a MITM-level blocker and an MV3 selector based blocker.
Opera was a strong contender to become my main browser (luckily firefox copied the most useful feature, it's vpn), if ublock is deactivated, I will let it go without a second look.
Since when does firefox have vpn,?
A week or two?
The solution then is to run the equivalent of a PiHole on your private network and then configure your portable devices to always use that PiHole as their DNS service via self hosted VPN
Pihole is great for DNS filtering but doesn’t hide elements, no filtering and script blocking.
DNS ad blocking is useful. It does not replace browser ad blocking.
Adtech company insists on ramming more unwanted ads down your throat
Chrome: uBlock Origin is dead.
Any other browser with uBlock Origin: Chrome is dead.
Mitchell baker dropped the ball (or was compromised) in that she did not ship firefox with an adblocker when they had the chance to stifle google
I expected some kind of fallout from Google nuking uBo. I've heard pretty much nothing so far.
I'm only one person but that was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I no longer use any google software/services other than gmail and even that is just a spam folder at this point.
That change came after Google's changes around MV3 were released. I actively campaign against using Google anything at my job as well.
Yep the MV3 thing was my ticket out also here. And some benchmarks about firefox better memory usage. All their parlance about they "protecting us" is patronizing.
"removing Effectively-dead code" nice euphemism for directly killing a feature people desperately want ...
If I stop having a way to block ads I will stop using the internet. They are so evil.
> Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
Switched back over to Firefox a few weeks ago, it's as pleasant as I remember it being.
Unfortunately sometimes my Intel Arc B580 has a driver quirk where all the windows freeze and unlike Chromium based browsers I can't open Task Manager and kill the GPU Process and have it restart and have everything keep working, but rather have to kill the whole browser and restart it and hope the tabs load back correctly - thankfully haven't had many issues with losing those (only once or twice in the past year, but those were fucking annoying).
Either way, I explored both Edge as my daily driver for a year or so and also Safari on my Mac - both are actually fine as far as the user experience is concerned, but in the end I still come back to Firefox. It's a browser, it doesn't feel user hostile, it does its job well enough. Also personally I like its devtools more.
thank god for firefox
Could brave browser continue their add block rampage?
AdGuard works fine for me, on YouTube as well.
uBlock Origin Lite works just as well. I don't see any ads anywhere. My experience has not changed one yota.
People just like to rage against Google.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
It's even available on iOS, I have it running in Safari
uBlock Origin Lite's author disagreed.[1]
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
I've never had to configure anything in uBO, it works great out of the box.
Therefore uBOL experience is practically the same. I haven't seen a single ads in months of browsing.
The author said clearly this was site dependent.
Just about obligatory mention of Pale Moon here. Have had a relatively clean internet experience for years with the old Firefox uBlock extension in combination with eMatrix. *Includes a disclaimer because I don't use Youtube and other assorted "social" media websites.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
Boycott evil companies.
I hope not, I switched from chrome to edge so I can continue using ublock origin.
So, consider this a layman explanation of why this change is bad from someone who spends their time securing end-users.
This change is good for the majority of users, but is actually bad for large enterprise customers and highly-regulated customers. It puts more control and onus of responsibility on to Google, rather than the end-user. So, we will expect to see better enforcement of controls from Google for the lowest-hanging-fruit that some aspects of MV2 exposed.
What's that, you say? MV2 changes? Well there's 3 things.
1. Remote code execution. The ability for someone to just yeet commands into your browser. A little harder to do directly.. Still very possible, just with extra steps.
2. Removing the ability for extensions to access network requests directly, which is what adblockers often relied on. It also means malicious extensions could snoop on your requests. They still can, just with extra steps.
3. Background persistence, an extension could stay alive, maintain state, run timers, keep connections open, and coordinate across tabs. So this shuts off the "background persistence" piece -- but helps with ensuring better isolation. Still possible, but now requires yeeting your data to an external provider instead of keeping the state contained locally.
Those 3 changes are incredibly powerful, and will impact many, many Enterprise security tools. Tools that now instead will result in products like "Island Browser", and "Enterprise Chrome" being rolled out to supplement the functionality that MV2 gave us.
This change goes against the US and Australian government's hardening advice, and reduces the overall efficacy of security controls we're able to implement within our web browsers natively.
CISA's own guidance on this is pretty straightforward (aptly named Securing Web Browsers and Defending Against Malvertising for Federal Agencies): https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/CISA%20CEG%...
Here's the Australian Government's control relating to it:
> Control: ISM-1485; Revision: 1; Updated: Sep-21; Applicable: NC, OS, P, S, TS; Essential 8: ML1, ML2, ML3 > Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
And if you're wondering about what incentives there are that led to this change, you can read this letter written to the Chairman of the FTC by a US Senator back in 2020. This letter is linked to from the same CISA document I shared earlier.
You should read it in full, and consider what incentives the Senator was referring to -- and how they also apply in this scenario.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/011420%20Wyden%20...
Those Enterprise Chrome products I mentioned earlier? Chrome's change has now put some of this functionality which was previously possible with an extension, behind the Enterprise Chrome Premium SKU: https://chromeenterprise.google/products/chrome-enterprise-p...
uBlock Origin Lite gives an identical browsing experience, ad-free. What is all the fuss about?
Your comment was redundant.[1] And contradicted in the uBlock Origin Lite FAQ.[2] And in the article.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
People still using that POS? :)
Clamping down on adblocking was always the plan and anyone who suggested differently was knowingly lying.
Google : "You will own nothing and like manifest v3"
smiling smugly from planet firefox
“Don’t be evil”
Yet another reason to also perform ad blocking at the network level (e.g. DNS). I’ve found AdGuard Home very easy to maintain. Using Firefox and Orion browsers too.
Actually the main killer feature of UbO for me is cosmetic filtering with element picker, if I wanted just any ad blocker I could use various browsers with built-in adblockers supporting lists.
So much for blocking at network level.
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Totally not a monopoly on the browser space /s
uBlock Origin lite exists. And in couple years usage I see no difference from non lite version.
The author of both appears to disagree.
His opinion is irrelevant. User experience is all that matters.
As a developer I've often built "inferior" versions of products for specific user groups. The product worked perfectly for those users, they saw no difference. Yet, when asked, I'd maintain that it's inferior because <technical reasons>. And you know what? We are both right.
You are saying that the author's opinion doesn't matter your singular experience is the only reasonable benchmark which seems less defensible. For practical quality we should also consider future resistance against anti adblocking something that the author is able to do unlike a user who just notices it hasn't failed yet.
Consider manifest v3 has a fixed block list that can only be updated with the extension and only with permission of the browser.
The author of both extensions stated facts of user experience.[1] This included some users would not notice a difference.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
This feels more like a gradual tightening of extension APIs under Manifest V3 than a sudden “kill switch.” uBlock isn’t going away, but its capabilities are definitely being reshaped...
It's all an excuse to try to neuter adblockers. The push for killing MV2 was suspiciously accelerated at the same time that youtube started implementing much more invasive anti-adblock techniques that really needed a full content blocker support (at least until people found new clever workarounds).
Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...
It is a "kill switch" - uBlock Origin will no longer work in Chrome 151 (July 28, 2026).
I'm far more faithful to Ublock Origin than I am any specific browser.
Sadly I don't think that's the general case, I've been on FF for decades but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
>but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
One wouldn't need to be loyal to UBO... a simple with-and-without comparison would be enough for anyone with a functioning brainstem.