I've never understood the criticism of Firefox on HN. I've been a happy user since 2004.
I viewed chrome the same as IE. Owned by a big US tech company that only cares about one thing, and that one thing isn't you or me, only what your and my data/views are worth.
As far as I'm concerned all criticism leveled at Firefox is neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware.
The criticism that people in these communities come up with is limited to button placement and pixel-to-pixel tab bar height, I wouldn't take any of it seriously. Especially in the current web browser climate, it's laughable. It's our moral obligation, as people with knowledge on the subject, to use Firefox.
I've expressed my distaste for the way Mozilla is managed again and again, and I hate the stupid stuff they do from the bottom of my heart, but there simply is no other choice.
That is a ridiculous strawman if I have ever seen one. There are MANY reasons to be critical of Firefox's development.
What about them putting ads in the URL bar suggestions? What about them (temporarily) putting ads into the new tab page that you couldn't opt out of? What about them removing the ability to customize the new tab page? What about them making it all but impossible to install your own (unsigned) browser extensions?
The complaints about the UI are that they also made it impossible to customize, not that the defaults are asinine (which they are).
exactly. It's like the house is on fire and people start to complain because they don't like the tapestry on the wall.
Would be nice to live in a utopia where we have so few problems this stuff matters but as it stands you have the choice between software that is technically independent and is at least reasonably aligned with privacy and user freedom and a bunch of chrome clones or derivatives that are run by dystopian megacorps
There is choice: people can use Webkit instead. Webkit and Blink have diverged significantly since Blink forked Webkit: Blink is as old now as Webkit was when the fork happened.
Completely covering up bookmark bar when clicked inside address bar is nothing? Limiting length of text in address bar is nothing? Removing icons from menus - so everything looks like gray mess is nothing?
At some level I understand when people on HN get mad at FF increasing the size of the tab bar and the occasional changes they make in the UI/UX. I've never had a major problem with them - it's been at most an hour of getting used to the new style, if at all - but I am honestly astounded by people who think it's a good reason to switch to Chrome. Cutting off your nose to spite your face?
Let's not pretend Mozilla is a saint or Firefox is close. Mozilla made a huge number of questionable moves over the years ("death by a thousand cuts")
I personally felt that the 2014 introduction of in-browser ads (pitched as "user-enhancing") marked a huge shift. For others it was the deep integration of the proprietary Pocket extension. For still others it was the weird Mr Robot cross-promotion that was pushed via a side channel or the Cliqz in-browser tracking or the booking.com in-browser ads.
At this point, it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition" / defense against anti-trust claims, and many of the naysayers would probably jump to a clean implementation that isn't bogged down by the lack of trust.
Well, we should remember that Mozilla is essentially funded by Google. [1] I think they are trying to remedy that a little bit by selling VPNs, but that's probably not gonna work.
Brave is probably a better option if you want to "drop out". Unlike Firefox, it is not a dying browser, and it's monthly active users are increasing: https://brave.com/36m-mau/. They do have a cryptocurrency for relatively privacy-respecting ads thing (Brave Rewards), but you can easily opt out of that. (Also, we should not be puritans about this, developers have to eat too)
It is still based on Chromium. But that's probably more of a plus for the typical user who cares more about websites working correctly than browser diversity.
Your only criticism of Firefox is that they get money from selling the default search engine spot to Google, but then your alternative recommendation is a browser that's fundamentally dependent on Google?
The day Google stops open-sourcing Chromium or start delaying public releases, or when another privacy-busting oopsie slips in the open-source codebase and Brave devs miss it, Brave is done. They don't have the manpower or experience to develop an actual browser.
The day Google stops buying Firefox's ad space, Mozilla has hundreds of alternative options for generating revenue.
The compat story for Brave and Firefox is about the same. Tracking protections in Brave broke sites more often than Firefox when I used it for a few months, and there was a recent incident where iCloud was being blocked in Brave.
And despite what a lot of people say, engine interop is only getting better thanks to initiatives like Compat2021. More sites work well under Gecko than ever before. Anyone remember IE6 era where Firefox needed bug-for-bug compatibility? It's been worse folks.
The "new" Firefox Mobile is a joke... they blocked thousands of extensions... Now only about 12 extensions total are available. I still use Firefox mobile v68.11.0esr even if unsupported.
> I've never understood the criticism of Firefox on HN
My only real criticism is that they keep making dumbass moves like putting ads in the address bar instead of trying to ask for money
Do a pro plan for silly people like me who would pay for a promise of no ads. Do an enterprise version of Firefox that hooks in to Active Directory or whatever for syncing
There is plenty of legitimate criticism of Firefox in its handling of web standards. For example, they've effectively ended development and support for PWAs on desktop, which would have blown up the future of desktop PWA development (a crucial functionality of the web, as far as most are concerned) if Firefox held a significant portion of the market.
The FF contributors make so many decisions that are just plain nonsensical and harmful to the progression of the web, as do Safari and Opera -- especially those two. And while nobody should ever trust Google's bastardization of Chromium, they and the Chromium contributors are really the only people pushing the web forward, while everyone else is desperately trying to pump the breaks on new APIs, for reasons nobody can explain. Reading a bug tracker thread for any of them is like surviving a 1980s BBS discussion between tape storage format elitists. Even when they're correct, they're all wrong because they're not thinking ahead, and we all lose because of it.
Same here. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively since the Firebug days, both for development and personal use. It has worked fantastically for me. But I have real issues whenever I try to use Chrome. I think it mostly comes down to what you are used to.
But chrome's security and performance is miles better than firefox.
The organization that overpays managerial people, fired technical talent, and funnels donations into political causes instead of browser development is not much better either.
It sounds like you could level that second paragraph at Google too.
Personally I take my security and privacy over performance any day. Firefox by default better protects my privacy, and it customisable where it doesn't. Add to this uMatrix, uBlock and disabling JavaScript I'm good for security.
I don't care much about negligible performance stats. I notice little difference, especially with the above mentioned add-ons/settings. The websites they break I don't care much about or allow on a whitelist basis.
Bad as Mozilla is I trust it more than Google, especially in regards to this thread and others currently floating on the front-page.
> But chrome's security and performance is miles better than firefox.
Not really. Maybe ~6 years ago but they've made insane progress. Full site isolation is rolling out now and the performance is great. Definitely faster than Chrome on my laptop.
My biggest criticism is that Mozilla removed the open-web RSS reader functionality and added a proprietary walled-garden Pocket read-it-later service. Are the two connected? I need to know.
You can turn on WebMidi by setting dom.webmidi.enabled to true in about:config, though that isn't a default so it's still a very valid criticism sadly.
I would love to switch to FF but the persona tabs in Chrome are just too convenient. I have a persona for Work, for Personal and Neither (spammy stuff of things I don’t want to get indexed recommendation engines etc). Is there a way to replicate it on FF?
You can manage and launch multiple Firefox user profiles using Firefox’s about:profiles page, though that UI is clunkier than Chrome’s.
Mozilla’s “Multiple Account Containers” extension can automate some of this. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities.
i love firefox as secondary browser (mainly some performance issues or minor hickups with certain kinds of web apps that rely on certain animations) and also donate regularly to mozilla, but the dev tools are the main pain point for me. nothing beats the usability of chrome dev tools and working in firefox always makes me feel limited in little ways i cant even point my finger to. in effect my own apps are optimized for chrome first and only improved for firefox as second step wich will then lead to the same small problems making other people use it as secondary browser.
My criticism is simple: Firefox has like a 4% market share, but an entirely separate rendering engine from the other browsers.
As a web developer, my job is already to chase down spec-violating implementation bugs in Safari, Chrome, and Edge. Having one more user agent out there does me no good; I'm disinterested in increasing my pain to support a 4% userbase.
I'd rather browsing be the purview of one or two giant, well-regulated players than a thousand minorly-incompatible little flowers.
> I'd rather browsing be the purview of one or two giant, well-regulated players
Key: well-regulated. These giants are anything but. And in the past several years Chrome basically said "I couldn't give two craps about Safari's or Firefox's opinion, we're going to ship our own APIs and call them web standards".
You must be quite new to frontend development, right? It's really never been easier than today to do this. Edge uses chromium and IE isn't a thing anymore (for most devs), so it's basically 3 modern and regularly updated browser engines which are _very_ close to each other features-wise.
Also, one of the biggest problems with Chrome has been that Google are breaking standards with it repetitively. If you're for well-regulated browsers, Chrome shouldn't be your browser of choice.
What an outrageously toxic and arrogant comment. There are many reasons to dislike Firefox. Just because you're not personally affected by those reasons, doesn't make people who are affected by them somehow mentally ill or lesser humans than you, your majesty.
Security. Whenever I push myself to go use Firefox I very rapidly run into obvious bugs and things like page display corruption that has the terrible bad code smell of shoddy insecure software.
I would really, really like to switch, but not for now.
Seconded. Firefox is better than ever. Can't believe there isn't a Chromium derivative with multi-select, table selection, and shift+right click. Containers are also incredibly useful.
I wouldn’t say it’s pain at all. Containers are a killer feature and I can’t imagine going back to a browser that doesn’t let me have isolated browser tabs in the same window.
The bulk of financial support Mozilla gets comes from Google, they stopped being a real competitor in the browser scene years ago. You don't really have a choice when it comes to modern web browsers, maybe Safari is the "safest" / most privacy-aware choice you can make assuming you already bought into the Apple ecosystem. What else is there, the crypto-mining scam that is Brave or the ProGaming WebBrowser / Chinese backdoor aka Opera?
But really, you're better off using something avangard that some nerd came up with during the weekend. At least these hobbiests' browsers can be trusted to be not be evil & greedy.
When did Firefox stop being competitive? They're keeping up with standards better than Apple (ElementInternals just shipped in v93) and it's fast. None of my 'normal' friends have complained about Firefox since switching to it.
Mozilla's relationship with Google also isn't set in stone. Yahoo was the main sponsor for a while.
What’s annoying with Firefox is how much it advertises.
Seriously, every time you start it, it opens one or even two tabs saying why Firefox loves you and protects you. It introduces nagging on the new tab page to tell you how much Firefox loves and protects you. It installs Pocket or has shortcuts to help you buy products that love and protect you.
Firefox also insists that you should create a Mozilla account and upload all your passwords over. Because they are so kind and protecting about your privacy.
Mozilla also fires people who donate to Christian charities for the beliefs they have (and yes, abortion is a belief, whichever side you are). Even if you are the founder of JS. Hear that: Mozilla fires people who are technically good, for political motivations. It’s as dystopian as it gets. They never apologized.
Mozilla is as dystopian as Google, and the worst evil usually sits with people who believe they are the good guys. In fact, they are sponsored by Google and share the same political slant.
I was curious if this is true, so I created a new profile. The first two tabs were the normal onboarding and the privacy policy. When I opened a new tab I did get the silly news feed so I clicked the gear icon in the top right and turned it off.
I haven't seen any nagging to create an account yet after mucking around with the UI.
And honest question, what's your idea for monetizing Firefox? They're pushing subscription based products to reduce the reliance on Google money and adding different avenues for sponsorships that aren't from Google. Sounds like a plan to me.
Also Brendan Eich had strong support within Mozilla. If I had to guess, he resigned because of external pressure. (remember OkCupid putting a banner on their service protesting Eich, that was wacky)
> Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer.
The FAQ elaborates at length about the situation and emphasizes why he stepped down.
Furthermore, the political contributions that triggered "boycotts, protests, and intense public scrutiny" were not to "christian charities" but donations to vehemently bigoted politicians across several decades, culminating with a donation to the California Proposition 8 PAC, a campaign to strip LGBTQ people living in California of the basic human right to marriage.
Since numerous HNers asserted that "there is no human right to marriage" last time this subject came up: read Article 16 of the UN human rights charter.
> First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology.
Yeah it was super annoying I had separate accounts for gmail/android and youtube. It is always a hassle to make sure im logged in with the correct account.
So it seems to me the most pressing issue is still creating a viable alternative to Google Search. I've tried to use Duck Duck Go and even Bing in the past but I've just not found the quality of the results to be nearly the same.
However - recently I've found G Search is getting steadily worse. They've made UX changes that make it harder to view cached pages, and it seems to ignore search operators frequently.
This is the biggest foothold to their dominance. YouTube, Gmail, Maps and everything else is in a supporting role to this core product.
Who is actively working on this and what is proving so challenging? What is stopping us from creating a viable Google clone, with the same level of high quality results?
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a long time now and I find Google to generally be worse than DDG.
A lot of crap in the results (SEO doing his bit I guess), more pages taken down in the results and terrible UI.
The code preview cards are great for copy pasting from stack overflow without even opening the thread.
Bangs let you search something in another engine if you can't find what you're looking for.
The only times when I need to use Google are:
- checking opening times of businesses
- checking maps, as Google maps is the only decent thing out there
- I never use Google images but DDG images safe filter doesn't catch everything (you get nsfw in images - maybe this has been fixed, but I experienced it as an issue in the years)
1. Ongoing investment -- for all that HN harps on Google being an "ads company", they still employ XX's of engineers to work on search continually. For every thousand engineers, you're looking at nearly a billion dollars of continual spend to continue employing them.
2. SEO -- for every engineer working to make Google better, there are probably ten engineers outside working to make the web worse. Sorting wheat from chaff is actually easy -- you just drop it and let the chaff blow away -- so I'm not actually sure what the appropriate analogy is here, but it gets harder and harder is the point.
I’m not sure if it’s a difference in how I structure queries (I often structure queries with “”, site: limiters etc), what type of things I’m searching for (often technical/troubleshooting documents but also videos), or what. But I have found the opposite. In fact I have use DDG almost exclusively for at least about 5 years now, if not longer. Rarely do I need to !g a search against google (though it does happen)
You get used to Duck over time. Many of us have lived in pre-internet times. It was fine. You don’t have to always get the best search results immediately.
You're asking a lot of an average user, though, if there are two options on the table and one is always going to be worse. We don't tell people with AM/FM radios "Just stay on the AM stations; you get used to the AC wire hum over time."
And to tip the scales on the Google hegemony, we need average users on board.
Yea I really wonder why they don't have competition. You'd think a search engine built with java in the mid 90s would be easy to replicate at least to it's 2005 era standard using modern tech.
The unique value Google has is the mass of users who provide them with data, by clicking (or not clicking) their search results. It's the same way with most of the big websites - they wouldn't get to where they are if they started out today. But having all this pre-existing traffic is a huge part of why they're more useful than their competitors.
We've been working on one such alternative - Kagi Search [1]. Kagi Search is currently in beta and we are also creating our own Maps app and a browser. In the future we will have email too so hope to offer an alternative way to experience the web.
Google's special sauce isn't particularly special: they have a couple solid signals by which they can tell that a given user didn't like the search result they vended, and they tune appropriately. Couple that with a little bit of user categorization ("our data shows there's significant difference between what users geolocating from the US and from Britain want when they search for 'biscuits'") and a history of collecting and refining that data, and you get a good search engine the same way Amazon gets a good product marketplace: sifting huge amounts of user traffic.
Google takes advantage of the network effect of being the hugest player, which is a positive feedback loop. A smaller player has less users to tune signal on and will adapt more slowly over time to user needs, on average.
> Who is actively working on this and what is proving so challenging? What is stopping us from creating a viable Google clone, with the same level of high quality results?
Search is hard. Organising the amounts of data that Google does is hard. Just look at Bing. Even with MS' resources it's terrible.
As for maps, look at Apple maps. Again, nowhere close to Google. There's also OpenStreetMap, Waze and probably others, none are quite on the level of Google. Definitely none can give you the experience of search -> navigation so quickly. Searching for and then navigating to a location on Google is just so much easier than the alternatives.
As for mail, at least there's tons of viable options there. Protonmail, Outlook, my personal fave is Hey.com (I hate email so their minimalist/focused functionality appeals to me).
Google got to their position by being very, very good at what they do. It's just a hard problem. Most other tech companies have tried and fallen short.
That's the message you hear as you move the slider over the company: from the left, the founding conscientious engineers, and to the right, the profit-maximizing, late and lateral entry executives.
The Google founders have managed to create this amazing narrative that they’re the good guys while all the bad decisions are just taken by the new money grubbing execs. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think they presided over a hyper growth stage of the company and left well before the pressures of profit maximization started to direct the company.
It’s extremely difficult for a company to not do things that would maximize its profits. I don’t think the Founder-Good narrative is productive, it doesn’t work. One possible way to limit the harm is by regulations (or enforcement of existing ones), to make “evil” activity more expensive and thus not an option.
Having a plan vs executing a plan are quite different things. I'm sure you could find all sorts of different "plans" that never came to fruition and stopped at the brainstorming/ideas phase.
It's nice to see the hypocrisy of the people who run these companies, who on the one hand virtue signal with all the woke nonsense externally, and yet behave immorally internally.
Google can both want to be hypocritical and continue to hire/promote people from marginalized communities and contribute to “woke” organizations (which to their credit, they seem to have, although recently we’ve seen the limits to what they will do).
They drank of the poisoned chalice of ad money. It is bad enough for most, but terrible for them because ads are worse information and search is about getting great information and making it useful.
If google is to be rescued, it must do so by removing it from ads.
That’s indeed what happened. If you’ve worked in any ad tech company, you will know that the people in charge are some of the most unethical sleaze bags you will ever know. It’s all about scooping up as much data as you can: most adtech tech companies operate out of the public eye and many of them barely comply with regulations designed to protect consumer data.
I was surprised that Google was so different. But then they drank from the poisoned chalice. So did Facebook, Snap, TikTok … and Reddit is trying hard tooo.
Readit News
I viewed chrome the same as IE. Owned by a big US tech company that only cares about one thing, and that one thing isn't you or me, only what your and my data/views are worth.
As far as I'm concerned all criticism leveled at Firefox is neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware.
I've expressed my distaste for the way Mozilla is managed again and again, and I hate the stupid stuff they do from the bottom of my heart, but there simply is no other choice.
What about them putting ads in the URL bar suggestions? What about them (temporarily) putting ads into the new tab page that you couldn't opt out of? What about them removing the ability to customize the new tab page? What about them making it all but impossible to install your own (unsigned) browser extensions?
The complaints about the UI are that they also made it impossible to customize, not that the defaults are asinine (which they are).
Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.
Would be nice to live in a utopia where we have so few problems this stuff matters but as it stands you have the choice between software that is technically independent and is at least reasonably aligned with privacy and user freedom and a bunch of chrome clones or derivatives that are run by dystopian megacorps
Dead Comment
Firefox is full of these types of changes.
I personally felt that the 2014 introduction of in-browser ads (pitched as "user-enhancing") marked a huge shift. For others it was the deep integration of the proprietary Pocket extension. For still others it was the weird Mr Robot cross-promotion that was pushed via a side channel or the Cliqz in-browser tracking or the booking.com in-browser ads.
At this point, it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition" / defense against anti-trust claims, and many of the naysayers would probably jump to a clean implementation that isn't bogged down by the lack of trust.
Who says switching away from Firefox means you have to switch to Chrome, the Google-controlled browser?
That seems like a false dichotomy to me.
Brave is probably a better option if you want to "drop out". Unlike Firefox, it is not a dying browser, and it's monthly active users are increasing: https://brave.com/36m-mau/. They do have a cryptocurrency for relatively privacy-respecting ads thing (Brave Rewards), but you can easily opt out of that. (Also, we should not be puritans about this, developers have to eat too)
It is still based on Chromium. But that's probably more of a plus for the typical user who cares more about websites working correctly than browser diversity.
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...
The day Google stops open-sourcing Chromium or start delaying public releases, or when another privacy-busting oopsie slips in the open-source codebase and Brave devs miss it, Brave is done. They don't have the manpower or experience to develop an actual browser.
The day Google stops buying Firefox's ad space, Mozilla has hundreds of alternative options for generating revenue.
And despite what a lot of people say, engine interop is only getting better thanks to initiatives like Compat2021. More sites work well under Gecko than ever before. Anyone remember IE6 era where Firefox needed bug-for-bug compatibility? It's been worse folks.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
My only real criticism is that they keep making dumbass moves like putting ads in the address bar instead of trying to ask for money
Do a pro plan for silly people like me who would pay for a promise of no ads. Do an enterprise version of Firefox that hooks in to Active Directory or whatever for syncing
Just get lost with the ad plays haha
I've lost my config multiple times due to a bug in session recovery.
After having lost yet another session I moved back to Chrome.
The FF contributors make so many decisions that are just plain nonsensical and harmful to the progression of the web, as do Safari and Opera -- especially those two. And while nobody should ever trust Google's bastardization of Chromium, they and the Chromium contributors are really the only people pushing the web forward, while everyone else is desperately trying to pump the breaks on new APIs, for reasons nobody can explain. Reading a bug tracker thread for any of them is like surviving a 1980s BBS discussion between tape storage format elitists. Even when they're correct, they're all wrong because they're not thinking ahead, and we all lose because of it.
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The organization that overpays managerial people, fired technical talent, and funnels donations into political causes instead of browser development is not much better either.
Personally I take my security and privacy over performance any day. Firefox by default better protects my privacy, and it customisable where it doesn't. Add to this uMatrix, uBlock and disabling JavaScript I'm good for security.
I don't care much about negligible performance stats. I notice little difference, especially with the above mentioned add-ons/settings. The websites they break I don't care much about or allow on a whitelist basis.
Bad as Mozilla is I trust it more than Google, especially in regards to this thread and others currently floating on the front-page.
Not really. Maybe ~6 years ago but they've made insane progress. Full site isolation is rolling out now and the performance is great. Definitely faster than Chrome on my laptop.
I normally use Firefox but have to pull up Chromium just for that one feature.
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Mozilla’s “Multiple Account Containers” extension can automate some of this. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
As a web developer, my job is already to chase down spec-violating implementation bugs in Safari, Chrome, and Edge. Having one more user agent out there does me no good; I'm disinterested in increasing my pain to support a 4% userbase.
I'd rather browsing be the purview of one or two giant, well-regulated players than a thousand minorly-incompatible little flowers.
Key: well-regulated. These giants are anything but. And in the past several years Chrome basically said "I couldn't give two craps about Safari's or Firefox's opinion, we're going to ship our own APIs and call them web standards".
Also, one of the biggest problems with Chrome has been that Google are breaking standards with it repetitively. If you're for well-regulated browsers, Chrome shouldn't be your browser of choice.
Dead Comment
And set DDG as the default browser.
I can't imagine why anyone here on HN still would use Chrome.
Because when the tab bar is full Firefox will overflow them while chrome will resize every tab until only an icon is left and then start the overflow.
If there is an extension to fix this I’ll switch but last I looked I couldn’t find any
I do. It's the only option for watching Netflix/Amazon Prime/Disney+ on Linux AND casting to a Chromecast.
I would really, really like to switch, but not for now.
Vertical tabs is so much more space efficient than horizontal.
But really, you're better off using something avangard that some nerd came up with during the weekend. At least these hobbiests' browsers can be trusted to be not be evil & greedy.
Mozilla's relationship with Google also isn't set in stone. Yahoo was the main sponsor for a while.
Seriously, every time you start it, it opens one or even two tabs saying why Firefox loves you and protects you. It introduces nagging on the new tab page to tell you how much Firefox loves and protects you. It installs Pocket or has shortcuts to help you buy products that love and protect you.
Firefox also insists that you should create a Mozilla account and upload all your passwords over. Because they are so kind and protecting about your privacy.
Mozilla also fires people who donate to Christian charities for the beliefs they have (and yes, abortion is a belief, whichever side you are). Even if you are the founder of JS. Hear that: Mozilla fires people who are technically good, for political motivations. It’s as dystopian as it gets. They never apologized.
Mozilla is as dystopian as Google, and the worst evil usually sits with people who believe they are the good guys. In fact, they are sponsored by Google and share the same political slant.
I haven't seen any nagging to create an account yet after mucking around with the UI.
And honest question, what's your idea for monetizing Firefox? They're pushing subscription based products to reduce the reliance on Google money and adding different avenues for sponsorships that aren't from Google. Sounds like a plan to me.
Also Brendan Eich had strong support within Mozilla. If I had to guess, he resigned because of external pressure. (remember OkCupid putting a banner on their service protesting Eich, that was wacky)
I believe the page you're talking about appears upon installation or update to a new version.
There's also: Preferences -> New Windows -> Select "blank page"
You can also install one of the de-branded Firefox remixes like Waterfox or Librewolf if you really want to be completely Mozilla-free.
> Mozilla also fires people who donate to Christian charities for the beliefs they have
Everything about this statement is factually wrong.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/
> Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer.
The FAQ elaborates at length about the situation and emphasizes why he stepped down.
Furthermore, the political contributions that triggered "boycotts, protests, and intense public scrutiny" were not to "christian charities" but donations to vehemently bigoted politicians across several decades, culminating with a donation to the California Proposition 8 PAC, a campaign to strip LGBTQ people living in California of the basic human right to marriage.
Since numerous HNers asserted that "there is no human right to marriage" last time this subject came up: read Article 16 of the UN human rights charter.
They are most definitely not. Its not even close. Google creates and maintains a world-wide spying apparatus, easy pickings for three letter agencies.
You can believe whatever you want about abortion. What you cannot do is force other people to change their behaviour to accommodate your beliefs.
> First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology.
However - recently I've found G Search is getting steadily worse. They've made UX changes that make it harder to view cached pages, and it seems to ignore search operators frequently.
This is the biggest foothold to their dominance. YouTube, Gmail, Maps and everything else is in a supporting role to this core product.
Who is actively working on this and what is proving so challenging? What is stopping us from creating a viable Google clone, with the same level of high quality results?
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
This is the killer feature for me because if I know I want to search wikipedia, reddit, amazon, pydocs I can directly.
If my search results are kind of bad, I just append !g and off to google I go.
It's not great, but it's done a lot for moving me away from google as a default.
A lot of crap in the results (SEO doing his bit I guess), more pages taken down in the results and terrible UI.
The code preview cards are great for copy pasting from stack overflow without even opening the thread. Bangs let you search something in another engine if you can't find what you're looking for.
The only times when I need to use Google are: - checking opening times of businesses - checking maps, as Google maps is the only decent thing out there - I never use Google images but DDG images safe filter doesn't catch everything (you get nsfw in images - maybe this has been fixed, but I experienced it as an issue in the years)
I’m not surprised you found no difference in Duck Duck Go or Bing. Duck Duck Go is just a whitelabel version of Bing.
Pretty much every search engine that isn’t Google uses the bing api.
It’s only the illusion of choice.
2. SEO -- for every engineer working to make Google better, there are probably ten engineers outside working to make the web worse. Sorting wheat from chaff is actually easy -- you just drop it and let the chaff blow away -- so I'm not actually sure what the appropriate analogy is here, but it gets harder and harder is the point.
And to tip the scales on the Google hegemony, we need average users on board.
[1] - https://kagi.com/faq
Google's special sauce isn't particularly special: they have a couple solid signals by which they can tell that a given user didn't like the search result they vended, and they tune appropriately. Couple that with a little bit of user categorization ("our data shows there's significant difference between what users geolocating from the US and from Britain want when they search for 'biscuits'") and a history of collecting and refining that data, and you get a good search engine the same way Amazon gets a good product marketplace: sifting huge amounts of user traffic.
Google takes advantage of the network effect of being the hugest player, which is a positive feedback loop. A smaller player has less users to tune signal on and will adapt more slowly over time to user needs, on average.
But their biggest foothold is Youtube. There is no other video host that matters, and their back catalog covers everything.
Search is hard. Organising the amounts of data that Google does is hard. Just look at Bing. Even with MS' resources it's terrible.
As for maps, look at Apple maps. Again, nowhere close to Google. There's also OpenStreetMap, Waze and probably others, none are quite on the level of Google. Definitely none can give you the experience of search -> navigation so quickly. Searching for and then navigating to a location on Google is just so much easier than the alternatives.
As for mail, at least there's tons of viable options there. Protonmail, Outlook, my personal fave is Hey.com (I hate email so their minimalist/focused functionality appeals to me).
Google got to their position by being very, very good at what they do. It's just a hard problem. Most other tech companies have tried and fallen short.
Anything's better than Google, even if it's worse.
Don't be evil.
Do not be evil.
Do be evil.
Be evil.
Evil.
What an utter disappointment amongst so many. Plenty here for future generations to be further disappointed. But not necessarily surprised.
It’s extremely difficult for a company to not do things that would maximize its profits. I don’t think the Founder-Good narrative is productive, it doesn’t work. One possible way to limit the harm is by regulations (or enforcement of existing ones), to make “evil” activity more expensive and thus not an option.
Further centralization, control and censorship.
If google is to be rescued, it must do so by removing it from ads.
Lol, I’m going to steal this one.
That’s indeed what happened. If you’ve worked in any ad tech company, you will know that the people in charge are some of the most unethical sleaze bags you will ever know. It’s all about scooping up as much data as you can: most adtech tech companies operate out of the public eye and many of them barely comply with regulations designed to protect consumer data.
I was surprised that Google was so different. But then they drank from the poisoned chalice. So did Facebook, Snap, TikTok … and Reddit is trying hard tooo.