Because that's what it means to be a hacker. Yes, installing Firefox is simpler (and I'm a Firefox user) but I respect the effort to overcome Google's measures in disallowing certain addons.
I still use firefox 70% of the time but this is wrong and go against what the users want.
So the solution is mental acrobatics while using a backdoor for access.
Pretty bad as in that isn't true?
Firefox is the option that doesn't intentionally leave users vulnerable to hostile adtech. Firefox is the option with containers. Past that it is performant and reliable under a wide variety of user loads and platforms.
or Pretty bad as in Firefox+forks are better than the alternatives?
It is true that some unfortunate default options were recently added to Firefox configs.
Those options are unfortunate because they are variants of anti-user options baked into Chromium - options created to keep Chromium users susceptible to big-tech's worst intentions.
They should at least implement it behind a feature flag, if they feel like virtue signalling how they're oh-so-concerned for the privacy implications. (while simultaneously launching an ads business in the backdrop)
Sure, it inspires ad blocking meta-discussion, but if you're complaining that the author has a strategically suboptimal approach to blocking ads then you have missed the point.
The difference between Firefox's 1x and Chromium's 100x + 100x is in the degree of harm visited upon the user.
Finding harsh fault with former while giving the much more egregious example a pass -- this makes sense if one feels Firefox isn't abusive enough towards it's users.
I like that it quarantines most of Facebook's shenanigans with cookies and the like.
I can't compare Brave's adblock to uBlock Origin, but it's probably good enough.
The only websites that break for me are those I broke on purpose by using ad-block.
Also important is that they tend to be Google assets like Gmail.
No glaring or usability issues.
What happened is that Firefox added some defaults that mimic a tiny bit of Chromium browser behavior.
Recommend extensions as you browse
Recommend features as you browse
Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
The effort to overcome the community's chance at discovering the workaround?
It's however still interesting in the sense that it might be fairly trivial to change, so chances are the next adblockers are going to ship executable that wrap chrome, modifying something like that at launch, allowing their extension to make use of it.
Obviously Google is going to hate it when random popular extensions start nagging users to download and install "companion" software in order to work, since that will train users to not think twice about these things and bypasses legitimate security efforts.
But Google made their own bed - and that of their users. Now they all get to lie in it together.
1 - Google Meet consumes 40%-100% of my CPU on Firefox, and my laptop becomes a space heater
2 - My Yubikeys don't work. Touching them doesn't get into any of the websites I use that use 2FA.
So, no Firefox.
When I eventually go indie, though: I am 100% making use of a Linux workflow.
>Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?
Sadly, yes. The networkign effect is extremely strong. Twitter was complained about even before musk, but it still too 3 years before people really started considering the move. emphasis on "consider": because twitter still has a lot of foot traffic for what it is in 2025.
No site works for me. Facebook, Google, none of them work. Even the demo at https://demo.yubico.com/webauthn-technical/ does not work.
except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing. Sure there are replacements (somewhat) for each of those categories, but they are not direct replacements, and require a cost of some kind (retraining, or a substitute quality). This is esp. true for gaming, and it's only recent that gaming has made some inroads via the steam deck (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC (only handheld PCs with AMD processors iirc).
People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.
In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience). Knock Windows all you want, but it honestly does quite a few pretty important things very well.
So that's why I'll spend some time to resist the negative changes.
Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.
Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.
- Tab grouping, now added in Firefox as of a few months ago
- built-in translation services. Firefox is slowly introducing this, but its missing many languages. In the meantime, a translation extension works fine.
- Google products operating better... but the issue here is obvious and outside of Firefox's control.
- various micro quirks from random sites I might find during research. Nothing functionality breaking, just clear examples where there was likely hard coded chrome user agent business.
- the occasional extension on Chrome that didn't have a Firefox port. This happened maybe 4 times total.
so, 2 things that are fixed (or close to), one anti-competitive measure, and the 2 smallest nitpicks I could imagine. I don't know what the fuss is that justifies Firefox being considered vastly inferior to Chrome these days. Even thsoe small issues are far offset by the ability to have proper adblock. Using Adblock on Chrome for my work computer is miserable.
Nothing dealbreaking, and I get that this is all on Google. But it's one of the clearest examples of where FF falls short of Chrome.
Until you switch to linux you won't understand how inferior your windows setup always was.
It's hard for us to tell you what you are missing out on, you simply need to experience it.
I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.
This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.
It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.
> People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.
When we say so here, we are telling you to switch.
Nobody should be forcing anything on friends/family.
I always suggest MacOS for friends/family for ease of support. I would never recommend Windows to anyone.
That judgement confuses me a lot. Window management, drivers and out of the box experience has been much better in Linux for the last 10 years in my experience. Sure, there are some companies that don't ship drivers for Linux or the configuration software is not fully fledged. Window management has almost always been better in Linux, but of course depends on the WM. Windows innovated one nice feature in Vista (aero snap) which most desktop environments has implemented since.
If you install Fedora, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, what are you lacking from that out of the box experience? Generally no driver installation needed, and no cleaning up of bloatware.
Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.
If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.
And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.
So yeah, maybe this is the year of Linux. After decades on this planet :p
The majority of users either use only web applications, or web applications and Microsoft Office.
The true majority of users are on mobile.
Windows is only unreplaceable for gamers. Which is fine, because Windows is a toy anyway.
Doesn't even exist anymore. She's "365 Copilot" and web-first now.
How about mixed DPI multi monitor setups? Great since Windows 10. On Linux, you're screwed. X doesn't support this. Wayland does, but not all apps work well with that, and not all apps and GPUs support Wayland.
*over the course of a few years, seriously.
In particular, it's sad to encounter such a rare issue only to then discover its true origin - Firefox implemented a necessary functionality according to spec, whereas Chrome decided to do its own thing. Case in point video streaming with Motion JPEG, Firefox dispatches events on every frame and uses a lot of resources, but Chrome decided not to do that, against the spec.
I set my default choice to pro-privacy (Firefox) and occasionally give it up to some Chromium variant if I depend on a functionality and a website justifiable needs it. The disruption to my workflow here is such a minor thing compared to what I gain usability wise, especially in the long run. I would never treat a software program like some religion, and it saddens me that even computer-savvy people do just that.
Apologies for hopping on this thread with off topic question, but would you mind describing your setup?
I haven’t tried this in years, but last time I did I had trouble getting pass-through to some of my hardware, in particular my nvidia card.
Agree with your approach 100%!
I've been using this since at least 2019, it's been fine. The only two issues are the mouse doesn't (always) align when moving across monitors and having a window across the display border has one side stretched, but why would you have windows like that?
I think people make mistake of trying Ubuntu LTS thats super conservative with updates so you are years behind. For desktop you really want Fedora or something even more up to date. I think people sould try Fedora silverblue or its derivatives (bazzite, bluefin) its “atomic” distros that cannot be easily broken (steamos does the same).
> This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.
> It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.
You would get a fully separate leisure desktop if you were running Linux in that VM so it sounds like you are running Windows in the VM because Linux gaming is not adequate.
And quite a few musicians. When they make my software for Linux - and, it works ootb - I/ we'll be willing to change.
I swear people slating Brave here haven't actually even installed it.
Oh and its opensource, not like theres anything hiding in the shadows here, you can go and look at the code behind how its all working for yourself if you're that paranoid.
Sure. But to me "hacking" this cat and mouse game is not very compelling. I feel like I've seen a thousand articles exactly like this over the years. This won't work in 4 months.
"It was patched in Chrome 118 by ..."
Or already?
Because hacking is about solving hard and unnecessary problems
Driver support is still a very big problem in my opinion, especially if you're a laptop user. There was a lot of tweaking with power configuration that I needed to do to prevent my laptop running Ubuntu 22.01 from dying in 2 hours. Additionally, trackpad drivers were horrendous, which made two-finger scrolling next to impossible to do with any sort of accuracy. Hardware accessories like printers, keyboards, etc. are still a gamble.
You're right though that it has gotten a lot better, but it's these little things that prevent most users from making the switch.
If you want to have GPU accelerated video output from a guest vm to a linux host, the only way is with a Windows guest (to the best of my knowledge). If you just need compute then that is different.