PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store

Getting rid of manifest v2 and propping up a scam extension. Chrome is looking more and more disgusting

You have to think about how Google abandoned Firefox, which at the time was quite good, in order to build their own browser. It was always about control and owning the data. They fund their business with advertising spread all over the internet. Manifest v2 allowed their browser to run extensions that block the ads that pay for Chrome to exist.

I keep wondering why people on HN use Chrome at all three days.

There was a couple of years when people posted demos that only worked in IE^H Chrome but right now everything I need works in Firefox and I don't even see demos that need Chrome anymore.

Use Vivaldi. Feel the internet like it's 2010 again. Vivaldi for the win.

Because Mozilla is as evil as google is and their browser is generally worse than chrome on average.

We are now just entering a timeline where chrome nose dives on that comparison chart of "who is better?" with compared to Firefox.

I keep Chrome as a work browser but use Firefox otherwise. I'm not even affected by the V2 manifest removal because I don't keep an adblocker on Chrome.

I won't go into whether FF is worse than chrome, but why do you think Mozilla is as evil as google?

not sure about all that but we are certainly in a timeline where nuance isn't valued

Also Chromium based.

For me: because Chrome is the only browser with worry-free sync.

Firefox's sync for example doesn't sync extension settings, search engines and it fails on Android multiple times per day, with the only solution to logout and login again.

I don't know why they particularly think that. But Mozilla developed a way to uniquely track people without their consent or knowledge. I am not ok with that and that is evil to me.

But you can still turn it off in the settings right?

I dont think theres anywhere in google chrome that you can turn off tracking telemetry to google.

And closed-source

Firefox was OK. I think people forget how much better it’s become since Chrome came out. V8 was so much faster than SpiderMonkey at first.

(I would argue that Chrome was targeted primarily at IE, though.)

> But Mozilla developed a way to uniquely track people without their consent or knowledge.

Which setting is that, DNS over HTTPS?

I switched back to Firefox the other day and this setting was enabled by default but it wasn't done silently. When you first launch Firefox a popup comes up saying it's going to be enabled but you have options to turn it off on the spot or click a link to learn more.

It's double edged sword. You have to use DNS either way. Everyone should decide for themselves which DNS to use.

Huh, I use FF sync across multiple devices and with extensions, on android etc... never had that issue, my only hitch can be the sync can take a bit for passwords and can't be manually initiated as far as i can tell. Might be the extensions you are using or how cookies are being handled perhaps?

I used both at the time. I think you are overstating the difference. There wasn't as much full-on JS on the web and for all the things people normally did, FF did not struggle at all.

If Chrome had been aimed primarily at IE, they could have continued to fund Firefox, or could have worked with Mozilla to do whatever improvements they wanted. For example, if the objective had been speed, Google had so much clout with Mozilla at the time that I feel pretty certain they could have contributed to building something like v8 into Firefox.

But it wasn't about any of that. It was about owning the browser because they decided it was in their strategic interest. And that's because their business was by that point entirely funded by people's eyeballs in a browser, looking at ads.

They did continue to fund Firefox. $555 million in 2023!

> Firefox's sync for example doesn't sync extension settings, search engines and it fails on Android multiple times per day

Chrome for Android doesn't support extensions at all, so I'm a bit confused as to how that's a better experience for you.

Vivaldi sync works like clockwork for me across Windows/Linux/Mac/iOS/Android after their last major update in this department.

It's not a difficult puzzle: I find an always working and worry-free sync of open tabs more important than having extensions on mobile. I'd like to have those too, but right now I have to choose.

I loved Vivaldi's configurability. But it's sync is slightly moody as well. It can fail for a while. Though it is better than Firefox's in that it fixes itself.

But Vivaldi doesn't support bookmarklets and I use those a lot.

They have completely redone their sync implementation a couple of months ago, which seems to have fixed all the lingering issues (and also added E2EE, which I consider the bare minimum in any case).