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'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.
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)
I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.
* uBlock Origin
* Privacy Badger
* Multi-Account Containers
* Flagfox
* Cookie AutodeleteMany 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-...
I definitely run into pages broken in firefox desktop or especially firefox mobile. Extra especially on proofs of concept advertised here on HN.
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.
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
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.
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.
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.