The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.
Sorry to break it to you, but yes, they are.
I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).
Now I'm on Android, and Ironfox is pretty good and Firefox is also available. The browser story on Android is leaps and bounds ahead of iOS.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.
Also names like "Adblock Plus" scare me. I don't want someone I don't trust getting my web activity.
I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).
Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.
His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.
Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.
The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.
I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)
Otherwise, though, Safari still supports MV2. Everyone seems to think webRequestBlocking is the only relevant change in MV3, but it's not. Equally important IMO is arbitrary JavaScript injection into web pages, which MV2 allows but MV3 does not.
MV3 is so locked down that you can't even use String.replace() with a constructed JavaScript function. It's really a nightmare.
Google's excuse is that all JavaScript needs to be statically declared in the extension so that the Chrome Web Store can review it. But then the Chrome Web Store allows a bunch of malware to be published anyway!
Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.
I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)
I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
I swear - people have such a hard on for hating Mozilla because it fails to live up to an impossibly high standard, while giving all the other corporations doing actual harm a free pass.
1. These can all be disabled by advanced users (largely without consequence)
2. They dont prevent things like installing apps or even gaining root access in the first place.
The very fact that you can install Linux is evidence of the different approach taken with macs (you can't easily install Linux of ios devices)
George Carlin: "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."
The interests of APPLE (who makes money on hardware, and credit card processing) don't align with the interests of Google (who makes money on ad's). I am all for open source, I'm all for alternatives. But honestly if you own an iPhone and a Mac then safari makes a lot of sense. I happen to use safari and Firefox on Mac and am happy to bounce back and forth.
I also keep an eye on ladybird, but it isnt ready for prime time.
And I'm still going to have a chrome install for easy flashing of devices.
Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.
Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):
Chrome: 1300
Firefox: 500
Safari: 100-150
Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)
Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.
That is very different than a world where every browser relies on Google for the core of their browser… and those who don’t rely on Google for funding (as they pay a lot of money to be the default search option in major browsers). Even Microsoft gave up on making their own browser, and now depends on Google. They used to own the entire market not so long ago.
People are saying this is a psyop, but I’m not sure what Google stands to gain from giving off the impression that they are seeking to control the entire market so they can steer the direction of the web for their own profit. That doesn’t make them look like the good guy, and should keep them neck deep in anti-trust filing from various governments. Where’s the upside? People feeling like they don’t have an option, so they give up and settle like Microsoft? Is that the angle?
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.
I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.
* uBlock Origin
* Privacy Badger
* Multi-Account Containers
* Flagfox
* Cookie AutodeleteNews to me.
If this is even true, in the end it's still "so what?" Meaning, the alternative is even worse so, let's say granted there is this problem. Where is the better alternative that does not have this problem? Chrome doesn't have other equivalent or worse memory problems? Even if not leaking, it simply uses so much it's the same end result.
I've never consciously noticed a problem with youtube so if there is a problem, it's not one that necessarily matters.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
I definitely run into pages broken in firefox desktop or especially firefox mobile. Extra especially on proofs of concept advertised here on HN.
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
There's no detour for politics.
Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actually doing anything.
Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that). Personally, I haven't had to resort to a non-Firefox browser or user agent spoof even once in well over a year now.
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
> a well known kindergarden
I am baffled by the choice to include this laughably obscure example alongside a major telecom. Surely there are better options less likely to be the fault of a random lazy web developer.
Youtube, for example seems deliberately hampered on non-chrome browsers.
Google should get slapped too, and they might be headed that way...
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/nx-s1-5367750/google-breakup-...
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
They use the same numbering scheme and go in lockstep:
> The trigger for Beta and Stable major releases is an equivalent Chromium release.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.
What countries banks?
I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.
15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)
Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....
The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.
The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.
Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
> I am baffled by the choice...
Rereading what I wrote, I see the unintended humour in my association.
That being said:
1. These are both websites where I don't have much of a choice whether I use them or not
2. I actually expected Verizon to have a terrible website based on the sum of my interactions with them (both online and over the phone) and how uncompetitive the market is. But I was surprised the kindergarden had a needlessly restrictive website because I thought they'd care more about their online presence. And, to be clear, the kindergarden's website is fancy and expensively designed, so their lack of Firefox support can't easily explained by laziness.
But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.
They have so much market share that they control the standards bodies. The tail wags the dog.
If not, then no, switching to another chromium based browser is not enough.
And fwiw my experience trying Brave was that the user experience was actually more different from chrome than Firefox.
Shipping Electron junk, strengthens Google and Chrome market presence, and the reference to Web standards, why bother when it is whatever Chrome is capable of.
Web devs with worthy skills of forgotten times, would rather use regular processes alongside the default system browser.
- Sometimes the standards don't define some exact behavior and it is left for the browser implementer to come up with. Chrome implements it one way and other browsers implement it the other way. Both are compatible with the standards.
- Sometimes the app contains errors, but certain permissive behaviors of Chrome mean it works ok and the app is shipped. The developers work around the guesses that Chrome makes and cobble the app together. (there may be a load of warnings in the console). Other browsers don't make the same guesses so the app is shipped in a state that it will only work on Chrome.
- Sometimes Chrome (or mobile Safari) specific APIs or functions are used as people don't know any better.
- Some security / WAF / anti-bot software relies on Chrome specific JavaScript quirks (that there may be no standards for) and thinks that the user using Firefox or another browser that isn't Chrome or iOS safari is a bot and blocks them.
In many ways, Chrome is the new IE, through no fault of Google or the authors of other browsers.
Also, sometimes the feature exists so the feature check is positive, but there is a bug in one browser that breaks your functionality, so you put in a user agent check. Then the bug gets fixed, but the user agent check isn't removed for years. I've seen that happen many times.
Mozzilla also invented Electron, when XUL applications were a thing.
Both failed, as shipping regular processes with the default browser kept being used.
Many see 'it works on Chrome and mobile Safari' as 'it works' and they can get project signoff / ship / get paid / whatever and don't care about other users
The company that has the application may not know until a few users complain (if they complain) and by that point it could be too late due to the contract, or they may not understand what a different browser is or care either.
It isn't unique to youtube either. Gmail offline mode only works on chrome, even though other browsers have the necessary APIs. And menu copy and paste in google docs uses a special chrome-only extension that google pre-installs in chrome, instead of the clipboard API that works in other browsers as well.
I can't fathom how there are so many devs that don't use adblockers. It is so strange and when I look over their shoulders I get a shocking reminder how the web looks for them.
it’s almost certainly going to take both of your ideas, more diversity in the browser space and political actions. and then other actions as well.
the collective We have fallen into a trap where we consistently talk down other important ideas because we think ours is important too (and it is.) i definitely catch myself doing this far too often.
i just hope We can get back to a place where We recognize that different ideas from our own are also important and will need to be used in our effort to solve some of our issues. because so many of these cracks we’re facing will require many many many levers being pushed and pulled, not one magic silver bullet.
Or actually learn how we use to ship software on the glory days of 8, 16 and 32 bit home platforms.
Now I do agree there are no alternatives for people that only care about shipping ChromeOS all over the place.
I don't even hate Electron that much. I'm working on a toy project using Electron right now for various reasons. This was just a bizarre angle to approach from.
Isn’t really about bypassing it to support the development of new extensions. It’s more just a blog about a new bug that the author found during their security research.
It’s really more a fluff piece promoting themselves than it is anything else. And to be honest, I’m fine with that.
My bigger takeaway from that article was how impressive this individual already is. They’re still a student and already finding and reporting several bugs in major platforms. Kudos to them.
Local proxy filter that is like a Pi-hole, but locally!
It's OLD, and became obsolete when browser plugins were invented, but now more relevant than ever!
Because it's between the server and the client - it can do what it wants!
It occurs to me that it could be a pathological edge case triggered by ublock and youtube interacting. I'm not going to disable it to find out.
I’m so fed up with these nudges.
The pattern is this:
- Google publishes a specification.
- They raise request for feedback from the Mozilla and WebKit teams.
- Mozilla and WebKit find security and privacy problems.
- Google deploys their implementation anyway.
- This functionality gets listed on sites like whatpwacando.today
- Web developers complain about Safari being behind and accuse Apple of holding back the web.
- Nobody gives a shit about Firefox.
So we have two key problems, but neither of them are “Google controls the standards bodies”. The problem is that they don’t need to.
Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”. This happened at the height of Internet Explorer dominance too. A huge number of web developers would happily write Internet Explorer-only sites and this monoculture damaged the web immensely. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The second problem is that nobody cares about Firefox any more. The standards process doesn’t really work when there are only two main players. At the moment, you can honestly say “Look, the standards process is that any standard needs two interoperable implementations. If Google can’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement something, it can’t be a standard.” This makes the unsuitability of those proposals a lot plainer to see.
But now that Firefox market share has vanished, that argument is turning into “Google and Apple disagree about whether to add functionality to the web”. This hides the unsuitability of those proposals. This too has happened before – this is how the web worked when Internet Explorer was battling Netscape Navigator for dominance in the 90s, where browsers were adding all kinds of stupid things unilaterally. Again, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The web standards process desperately needs either Firefox to regain standing or for a new independent rendering engine (maybe Ladybird?) to arise. And web developers need to stop treating everything that Google craps out as if it’s a done deal. Google don’t and shouldn’t control the definition of the web. We’ve seen that before, and a monoculture like that paralyses the industry.
Yes, Windows supported Electron-like applications back in the 90s with HTAs. If you want something modern and cross-platform, Tauri does this:
I don’t believe the lawsuit claims this, does it?
> which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
This is untrue.
- Most developers pay 15% for in-app purchases. Only the tiny proportion of developers earning more than a million dollars a year pay 30% and even then, it’s 15% for subscriptions after the first year.
- This is not any purchase made through an app. This only applies to digital goods and services.
Sure, go ahead and install Firefox, LineageOS, etc. (I did so too and am a happy user of both). But I'm just saying that this is not fighting the monopoly in any way, it's just retreating into a bubble where we can ignore it for a while.
I have no answers as to what to do instead, but I think acknowledging that a strategy has failed would be a useful first step.
we have enough data to show that this is not the case, in general.
Probably for Google the easiest way to keep 3rd-parties from integrating native ad blockers is through licensing agreements for new code/modules in chromium. At this point there will be a fork of chromium, taking the latest non-adblockerblocker-licensed version and the two versions will start to diverge with time.
My point however was not that Google might one day block 3rd-parties from integrating ad-blockers in their own chromium variant. My point was that building on the chromium-base will improve the chromium-base, which will improve Chrome and additionally allow them to claim they haven't monopolized the browser market.
Genuine incompatible-by-time forks of chromium are not in Google's interest and thus Google needs to balance their competing interests of maximizing ad revenue, but also keeping Chrome a high-quality product and not being seen as a browser monopolist.
No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.
That way, you give these organizations the power to nuke Chrome, one day.
This can also be seen as a kind of mutually assured destruction approach, to keep Google in check.
In Chrome 135, which is very recent—the public is currently on Chrome 138—Google added an execute() method to run an individual script. However, the API is not available from the extension content script, so if it needs to be triggered from the content script, you have to make an async call to the background script (or more accurately, the background service worker, which is a whole other nightmare of MV3). Moreover, the API accepts only a string for JS code or a filename; you still can't use a Function() constructor for example.
In Chrome 138, the current version, Google switched from developer mode to a dedicated userscripts permission toggle in the extension details, which is disabled by default. I think Google is still working on but has not finished a permissions request API. Remember this is almost SEVEN YEARS after Google first announced Manifest V3. The entire time, Google has been stalling, foot dragging, practically getting dragged kicking and screaming into doing the least possible work here.
Here is a list of great browsers committed to MV2 support. If anybody from Google tries to gaslight you with "but security..." review this:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=gmail.com
and ask them why do they still support connection with so many insecure tls suites ;-)
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/download/
Brave: https://brave.com/download/
Waterfox: https://www.waterfox.net/download/
LibreWolf: https://librewolf.net/installation/
Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml
Thorium: https://thorium.rocks/
Ungoogled Chromium: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...
It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.
(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)
Businesses who hire such web developers will lose huge amounts of sales, since 90% of visitors are on mobile and half of those are on Safari.
I think you’re wrong about Safari itself being the reason chrome isn’t a 90%+ market owner; rather, it’s apple’s requirement that no other browser engine can exist on iOS.
What exactly do you mean by this?
IE was horrible to use which is why so many people switched to Firefox. It wasn't because of web standards.
IE didn't have tabs when every other browser moved to that.
IE didn't block pop ups when every other browser would do that.
A politician isn’t even a practicing politician without votes. Democracy is ultimately driven by citizens. Of course politicians will do their best to influence public opinion (it’s their job) but are ultimately in service to it though elections.
It’s why what people think (and vote) matters in a democracy.
And back to the point, why voting with your feet (switching to Firefox) actually means something.
Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.
For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.
The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.
This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.
Here's the ones I hit and reported: ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail.
For a normal user they would just switch back to chrome because that is what works, they don’t care about our complaints, they care that what they want to use works.
One of them is my router.
Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.
There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.
Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.
This is a little disingenuous because Apple often falsely claims security when it’s to hold back tech that could loosen the App Store grasp.
Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.
And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.
Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.
Easy when they make Chrome do whatever they want and call it a living standard (whatever that is). There is no such thing as web standards now.
^ Every single time this comes up on HackerNews for the past decade
It sounds like capitalism has so far saved us from a Chrome monopoly, then.
My lament is more about the current situation and our apparent inability to escape it.
In this case, I may also be annoyed a bit about your rant on ideologues. Just because people don't make decisions based on their ideology doesn't mean they don't make decisions based on ideology.
I mostly avoid Google websites, but when I can't, I always use Brave/Edge/Chromium on those. E.g. Google Earth is especially useless outside of Chrome-land.
Firefox (with uBO) also probably wins any realistic speed comparison simply because it still supports MV2. I really don't care how fast the ads are loaded, I prefer blocking them. Especially the most privacy invading ones (i.e. by Google).
There can be no free market if your government intervenes in every transaction.
Apple are by far the worst offender and I can't wait for Safari to die
One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.
In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.
Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.
Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.
I made a reader app for learning languages. Wiktionary has audio for a word. Playing the file over web URL works fine, but when I add caching to play from cached audio blob, safari sometimes delays the audio by 0.5-15 seconds. Works fine on every other browser.
It’s infuriating and it can’t be unintentional.
1: Assuming he even elected to do it; I know I wouldn't.
webdev in 2025: OMGWTF NOTHING WORKS WITHOUT THIS NEW SHINY FEATURE RELEASED YESTERDAY AAAAAAAAA!!!!!111
Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)
Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.
Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.
And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.
I really like being able to install websites as apps too so my WM can manage them independently.
> ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).
For most people, that means installing Firefox or using Safari. There are others, but the space is small. Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.
Truth is we like to complain. It's good to push things forward and find issues that need to be fixed, not nothing is perfect. For every complaint about Firefox there's another for Chrome. You can't just switch to Brave, Edge, Opera or some other color of Chrome. Things will feel different, but really it's easy to make mountains out of molehills. So what do you care more about?
[0] short term, yes. Long term no. Classic monopoly gets lazy and rests upon its laurels
Surprisingly this async serialize/deserialize nature of the API (https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/blob/cdfc253c07... ?) somehow still manages to inject and execute scripts fast enough to make them act like content scripts at document_start. The only problem is no arbitration between extensions, cant force Tampermonkey inject before uBO (tons of adblock filters disable functions required for Tampermonkey and effectively kill Tampermonkey in the process).
I keep many browsers on my laptop and use whichever one I must for in-compatibility reasons and primarily Firefox which makes me generally a happy camper. Mac os.
Mobile is different.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. I used Firefox exclusively for about a year and had a website not work about once a month. This included my state's unemployment portal and a small business store.
When it happens, there's no indication of why. It's only because I'm technical I thought too try it in Chrome. My non-technical family isn't going navigate that.
I disagree, on two fronts.
First, I think that the underlying root cause is a level lower - it's the fact that so much content on the web is funded via privacy-invasive and malware-laden advertisements, rather than direct payment.
Second, there are multiple valid things that you can do - you don't just have to pick one.
You can work on Manifest V2 bypasses and you can boycott Chrom{e,ium} and you can contact your representatives to ask them to craft regulation against this and you can promote/use financial models where you pay for stuff with money instead of eyeballs. All are useful! (especially because regulation is incredibly difficult to get write and takes a long time to build political will, draft, pass, and implement)
However, the software seems safe. Their privacy policy says they only store websites locally, and never upload them to servers. The app is also open-source.
Ad Block Plus is not privacy respecting. They collect usage data as well as unique device identifiers.
I suggested that MV3 would be a big nothing from the beginning. And people on HN argued with me every step of the way (mostly people in the latter category who refused to do even the slightest bit of research or verify that the people who they were parroting were actually reliable reporters of anything at all).
Now that MV3 is here, we can see this. MV3 is here. MV2 is gone. And ad blocking still works.
I just installed Google Chrome, clicked on some YouTube videos, and verified that I was getting ads. Then I installed Ublock Origin Lite, and the ads disappeared. I no longer get display ads or video ads on any website.
Now, if you want to bring up some edge case or something, be my guest. But for 99% of even ad block users, strictly speaking, blocking ads is more than enough.
There is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because anti-war imagery is the same imagery that pro-war films use, it’s just the interpretation and meanings are reversed.
Might it also be true, that there is no such thing as effective antitrust enforcement, because the one doing the investigating and enforcement is unwilling or unable to kill the goose that lays golden eggs, because their own employer’s budget and state apparatus directly and indirectly relies upon taxing golden eggs. Perhaps we’re all just carrying water for giants and giant-collaborators, whether or not giants even exist.
Is it OK to use non-Chromium browsers that send search query data or other behavioural data to Google by default
"Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web."
Let's say, hypothetically, the company behind a particular non-Chromium browser is Google's business partner and dependent on Google for its continued existence
And that Google can effectively pull the plug on this non-Chromium browser at any time for any reason
Would choosing this particular browser be a correct course of action to "hit them where it hurts"
It's definitely true I've run into errors but usually those are addon issues. Maybe I'll run into an issue a few times a year on some niche website but that's about it. But most people aren't going to those places
I don't think that's true at all - usually brand comes first and ethics are not even considered.
> the product itself still has to a good choice for the customer to make a purchase
Not at all, the consumer only needs to be made to believe that it's a good choice which is very far from being the same thing.
This is what Mozilla has to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
Again: Generally speaking, when Apple rejects a proposal, Mozilla do too. What’s Mozilla’s motivation for doing this and lying about it?
There should be a name for this kind of fallacy, where you look at a snapshot of a dynamic system (or worse, at initial conditions), and reason from them as if they were fixed - where even mentally simulating that system a few time steps into the future makes immediately apparent that the conditions mutate and results are vastly different than expected.
> True capitalism can never exist
I just mention this because it's not a problem exactly limited to capitalism. It's a problem that exists in many forms of government and economics (like socialism). It just relies on asymmetric power
It's not ideaology to want things to work. Last time IE lost because it lost sight of the fact that it was utter dogshitte.
Chrome is now utter dogshitte, users will (eventually) be unable to ignore that...
According to who? Tech journalists?
> 95% of them never left
Probably 95% of a VERY small number.
> it's easy to check and changes your opinion
Actually, I'd encourage you to take into account my theory that an incredibly, INCREDIBLY small percentage of Reddit users were making a LOT of noise about leaving Reddit, and it made a lot of people believe that there was a mas exodus, when most people didn't care at all. (What was the mass exodus supposed to be over, anyway? Blocking 3rd party apps? I know that HN is a tech worker echo chamber, but really, how many people out in the wild even trust 3rd party apps at all?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
> His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. Critics argue that his involvement in Guatemala facilitated US imperialism and contributed to decades of civil unrest and repression, raising ethical concerns about his role in undermining democratic governance.
> He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations. His uncle was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
> The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays. In episode one, Curtis says, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04&list=PLktPdpPFKH...