[ncann]

Serious question: I love FF because of many reasons, but "additional voice at the web standard group" is quite far down the list for me. The top reasons I'm using FF right now are the features, namely high customizability on everything, TreeStyleTab, Picture in Picture mode with subtitle support, container tabs, all the privacy stuffs, and so on. How hard is it to have all these features with another engine like Webkit or Blink? Would there be a chance of FF keeping these features but switch out the engine it uses so that it takes less engineering effort to maintain?

[ajvs]

Firstly Mozilla is never going to switch to Chromium engine because it'd indicate giving up most of what makes it unique. Second to redo all their unique features would take a number of years, particularly all the privacy aspects that the Tor Browser relies on. Compare it to Brave for example, they've had years to work on their browser and it's not got any of the aforementioned Firefox features and a fraction of the privacy ones.

[wooque]

Brave has even better privacy and anti-fingerprint measures than Firefox

https://privacytests.org/

[Blasters]

Brave has more privacy feature out of the box. LibreWolf which is Firefox with changed settings is superior. besides the site only shows if a privacy feature is present not how good it is.

[LinuxBender]

Please correct me if I am wrong, have not followed LibreWolf for a while. I did try it out for a bit. I believe they are just implementing some facets of the custom user.js [1] and custom policy files and then changing where cache files are stored.

I was not a fan of their cache location changes as I had to write custom rules in bleachbit [2] to vacuum/compress/clean database files created by LibreWolf. In a weird way I think they made their browser less private with that move as not everyone is going to write custom bleachbit rules.

[1] - https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

[2] - https://www.bleachbit.org/features

[Blasters]

it has changed user.js with build in ublockO and removed bloat like pocket.

there is no point in manually deleting cache since it's wiped when closed (you can also change that in Firefox)

it is better Firefox

[LinuxBender]

there is no point in manually deleting cache since it's wiped when closed

I used to think this as well but bleachbit shows me every time I close my browser there is much to be cleaned. I launch firefox using firejail and then when firejail exits it calls bleachbit. Even if I use "History" -> "Clear recent history" and select "Everything" there is still a lot of crud to remove. Try it out if you have some spare time.

There's even a few things that bleachbit misses by default such as moz_historyvisits in places.sqlite and files in the datareporting directory that get created even if ff is told not to create them.

[wooque]

LibreWolf is more slower than even Firefox. Getting 10% better privacy for half the performance and possible incompatibilities on the web is not worth it.

[Blasters]

no, also just disable JS and all sites will run faster than they ever could

[foepys]

In today's webbrowser landscape Safari is the one lagging behind.

Firefox is doing very well in regards to implementing web standards while Safari doesn't implement enough to be called up to date or modern.

[matthewmacleod]

This is not really true, for what it's worth. The latest releases of all browsers are fairly comparable; Chrome is a bit ahead, and Safari and Firefox mostly trade off against each other: https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+103,safari+15.5,firefox+...

[foepys]

Some of those are pretty major, while others are nice to have, and some others are privacy nightmares and Firefox not implementing them is deliberate, like the battery and gyroscope APIs.

Safari doesn't support CSS subgrids, AV1, Push API, HTTP/3, and regex lookbehind.

Except for Push API and video codecs, I see those as major flaws holding back the web.

Firefox can do better at some CSS functionality, with that I can agree.