[mrguyorama]

What is Brave going to do when the code for WEI becomes load bearing in the chromium code base?

Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox. I literally don't care if you have to hold up your nose, there's only one actual alternative browser engine, and it's a matter of survival for anyone who doesn't want the whole internet controlled by google.

It could be half as fast (it isn't) and use twice as much RAM (it doesn't) and ask for a damn nude photo of me and I'd still be using it right now.

Using a google owned browser engine is like growing cavendish bananas while you know the neighbor's farm has the blight already. Change over and try to get good at the new strain while you have a choice, because soon you won't and it will be out of your hands what happens after that.

[Melatonic]

Honestly modern Firefox works better than Chrome for me at everything - better memory management - faster loading times - better extension support.

[TheCoelacanth]

There is only one set of site where Chrome performs better than Firefox: sites made by Google. I can't help but assume that it's intentional.

Unfortunately, for many people those are very important sites.

The Internet desperately needs some government to step in and force Google to spin off Chrome as an independent company. It's the only hope we have of stopping Google from completely ruining the Internet.

[Incipient]

In this era we need to move to the idea of "effective monopolies". Just because Chrome isn't an absolute monopoly, doesn't mean it can't essentially dictate whatever direction it wants in a mostly unchecked manner.

[mrguyorama]

Even American "monopoly" legislation, and our horrible "only care about the consumer" opinion on monopolies has ALWAYS supported breaking up companies that don't have 100% of the industry because they do anti-consumer shit with whatever percentage control they have.

[mrguyorama]

And yet, despite being widely understood as purposely handicapped on non-chrome browsers by using a specific, internal library that is especially optimized inside the V8 javascript engine, Youtube works just fine on Firefox.

There is no "it's slow" excuse to not use firefox. Even if it took a full second longer per page load, WHICH IT EMPIRICALLY DOES NOT, that would still be an acceptable price to pay to not HELP ONE MEGACORP LITERALLY HAVE FINAL SAY OVER ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS ON THE INTERNET

[TacticalCoder]

On Linux the one area where I feel (nothing scientific) that Chrome is faster is for JavaScript code execution. But I still use Firefox instead of Chrome.

[ziftface]

I used to feel that too but not anymore. Now when I boot up chrome to test something I don't notice a difference. I think it's improved quite a bit over the last few years.

[CamJN]

I mean, chrome is the slowest js engine at the moment: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...

[stevage]

I love it.

Although currently I am mostly using Chrome for web dev, and Firefox for everything else. On my current project, FF just couldn't seem to handle the churn of constantly loading heavy pages, dev tools etc.

I should switch to a chromium really.

[sedatk]

Firefox is great but I can't make it my daily driver because of two issues:

- Terrible font kerning on canvas (Google Docs, Spreadsheets) (probably a decade old bug)

- Doesn't sync icons in favorites bar (which I use without accompanying text, so, big deal)

[raxxorraxor]

Never noticed the fonts, but I noticed the vastly reduced image quality in Chrome on many websites that scaled down images.

[mrguyorama]

So, having slightly harder to read fonts, and the wrong favicons, is enough to help google own the web.

Jeeze. C'mon, this is exactly what I'm bitching about. How horrific would Google have to be in their position of power over the web before you finally are willing to suffer even a minimal drawback to prevent it?

[sedatk]

Yes, and maybe, there's a lesson for you to take from this: such small things may accumulate into world overlordship of an evil corporation. Do you remember how Google Chrome gained marketshare over Internet Explorer? It was all minor annoyances with IE like slow startup, a single page crashing the whole browser, unmovable tabs, big download windows, having multiple search bars. That was it[1]! Chrome never promised "an entirely new web experience", but fixed all the minor annoyances that had lingered during IE's dominance and never been fixed.

So, guilt-tripping users into using Firefox is a terrible idea, and might actually backfire. This is an institutional crisis we've been experiencing by both Firefox and Google making bad product management decisions. Firefox has come a long way, and I applaud it for it, but it's not my fault that Firefox has been so behind in the race. Keep blaming people as much as you want, that's the truth.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080903104921/http://www.google...

[wilsonnb3]

IMO the best hedges against Googles web monopoly at the moment are Apple and Microsoft, not Mozilla.

Apple because of Safari (duh) and Microsoft because they are possibly the only company that could reasonably maintain a hard Chromium fork in the case of Google going crazy.

Unfortunately all three of them are more or less aligned on this issue of remote attestation so I don't really see a path forward.

Firefox just doesn't have the market share to matter. If everyone had switched to it 10 years ago there might have been a chance but the goose is cooked.

[raxxorraxor]

The best course against web integrity is not let it establish itself. So we need to identity attestation servers and block them on the networks we maintain.

[Brian_K_White]

Neither Microsoft nor Apple has any problem with your or my problem with Google.

[wkat4242]

This might be the trigger for people to use it again though.

[jacooper]

No normal user cares, they didn't care when Safetynet remote attestion was rolled out, and they won't care this time either. Chances are normal users who use Firefox for some features like tab containers will just leave.

[thewataccount]

> Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox.

What happens when Firefox refuses to implement WEI - then <insert large social media companies> start to require it?

If WEI becomes a common requirement then Firefox will effectively be forced to implement it or it won't be usable as a web browser at that point for the average consumer

[popcorncowboy]

Yeah this gets tricky for Google and Mozilla. Goog need FF (and pay for it) to be around and not be meaningless in terms of market share because anything else and it's hard for big G to keep pretending they don't have a crushingly obvious monopoly. Mozilla need Goog because you know, hundreds of millions of reasons. FF bowing to WEI would be the ultimate capitulation. But as you say, if WEI flies, Moz capitulates or dies.

It's tough for Goog. They're playing the end-game card here. It's tough, because it's the game winner. On the one hand, total and complete domination of the web. On the other.. Kahn's FTC and the pesky EU technocrats shaking those tired old antitrust lawsuits..

I love FF. But if WEI or whatever future version of WEI gets up, FF will join the party or consign itself to eventual irrelevance. "I use FF for the web, except banking, most major corp sites, paid content, and an increasing bunch of other stuff - but those four bloggers who still post plain HTML pages, FF all the way, go indie web!"

[JeremyNT]

Sure, this is what it looks like if/when we've fully lost the fight.

Those of us who currently recommend Firefox are hoping that there's still enough time to do something about this.

Maybe it's already too late, but you might as well try, you know?

[antisthenes]

Firefox is <2% user base at this point, and financially completely beholden to Google.

The fight was lost long ago, several times (once when they decided to throw out thousands of developer work years by gimping all the addons)

[mrguyorama]

My entire point is that firefox is as 2% because all of us petty and pathetic individuals are unwilling to do even the littleist thing to make the world a better place at our own expense.

Using a slightly worse (and I argue it isn't even) web browser won't kill you, yet everyone on here has excuse after excuse to continue to help google have control over the entire internet.

Pathetic.

[kaba0]

Google is just as beholden to Firefox existing, if it doesn’t want to be sued to oblivion.

[thewataccount]

I'm not sure "I'm not a monopoly, look my competitor owns 2% of the market" is an effective defense anyway?

I think only Safari really counts as a "competitor" at 20% market share and doesn't share the chromium base (compared to edge, etc).

[fsniper]

Or Firefox and other browsers against WEI gain a significant userbase that these websites can't use WEI to discriminate.

[wkat4242]

Most people don't really interact with social media via the web anymore anyway. They use apps.

[TacticalCoder]

> It could be half as fast (it isn't) and use twice as much RAM (it doesn't) and ask for a damn nude photo of me and I'd still be using it right now.

Same. I mostly use Firefox (I still use Chrome for testing) and it's a good browser in itself: not just because it's not Chrome/Edge.

[fsniper]

Exactly. To have a fighting chance to not loose your control over your hardware and software choices, you need to do compromises. (Which we are already loosing on many fronts.)

I see people complaining Firefox having subpar font rendering, in sufficient tab management, Mozilla not acting up to their standards, but lack on some fronts.

So what? You won't make compromises on some of your convenience and still use a user hostile company's software, or forks of it which strongholds you to their whims? And expect everything to play in your favor? Silicon Valley is trying to profit against your best interests.

I don't really say you should be using Firefox, but saying you should use some other browser which is not depending on Chromium, or forks.

I also can say Safari would not be the best choice here. As Apple is the Pioneer on restricting you, the users.

[Spivak]

It won't matter, if WEI catches on Firefox will be in the same boat. Any non-WEI browser is equal in terms of protesting it. The threat is sites will lose their users if they start requiring it. If anything Chrome derivatives that patch it out but still pretend to be Chrome are even worse for website operators that want to use it.

There's lots of reasons to use FF, this isn't one of them.

[pkulak]

The excuse is always that Gecko is harder to integrate... but at what point is maintaining all these patches harder?

[MrAlex94]

I’ve been maintaining a “soft” fork now for about 12 years now, most of that time on my own. It’s actually possible to get quite involved and do some cool stuff with the changes you make, while keeping up to date; with the resources the size of a company like Brave have, it’d be incredibly straightforward to actually use your own browser logic, with a bit of good engineering. (To all intents and purposes, using Gecko as the engine and your own browser features on top of that, separate to Firefox itself).

I’ve started myself in the past, and am picking that back up again. But by all means it’s quite possible.

[franczesko]

Firefox needs to win mobile. In my opinion this is where Brave excels.

[phero_cnstrcts]

As soon as I can use custom shortcuts I’ll switch back to Firefox again.

[commandlinefan]

Or Brave could just do what they should have done in the first place and develop their own browser engine from the ground up - by now they ought to have the resources to do so, and the world could really do with more than the handful we have now.

[geraldwhen]

Mozilla is a political organization, not a web browser developer. I’ll keep using brave.

[postalrat]

Brave is a cryptocurrency. No thanks.

[gabrielsroka]

I don't see that at all. I've been using Brave for years and nothing to do with crypto. There is a BAT thing, but you can disable it.

[postalrat]

The BAT thing is the cryptocurrency. No thanks.

[gabrielsroka]

I said that, but you can disable it.

Can you explain your comment? Is it forcing me to use crypto and I'm not aware of it? Am I mining?

[postalrat]

I'm not interested in handing over my privacy to a company seeking out creative sources of revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Business_m...

[mrd3v0]

Really? Mozilla is a political organisation and Brave, the very same organisation that hires a fired Mozilla CEO that publicly opposes same-sex marriage, is not a political organisation?

Cool.

[gmerc]

Every corporation is political. To pretend otherwise is … American.

[mrd3v0]

Agreed. Just perplexed by the double standards.

[CamJN]

Brave is a man-child’s tantrum that he had to face the consequences of being a bigot.

[UtopiaPunk]

If Mozilla is a "politcal organization," their whole politics is centered on how to shape the web. And, idk, having a strong position on such ideas seems pretty damn relevant to this conversation.

Using "political" like a slur is childish and naive.

[m463]

don't add the code.

[alphanullmeric]

Firefox on iOS is awful. Basic features like swiping the toolbar to switch tabs are still missing.

[hamandcheese]

Firefox on iOS is not Firefox.

[super256]

The engine is not, but the UI still sucks. I read on HN that Mozilla started working on a new iOS browser, since we all expect Apple to open up iOS in this or next year to custom browser engines. I hope they will make this new Firefox for iOS a reason to never touch Safari again (I miss Firefox Sync + Firefox add-ons so much!!)

[alphanullmeric]

Nor is chrome or brave, yet Firefox is the only one with such a poor experience.

[cmgriffing]

Brave is not just a wrapper on top of Chromium. It is actually using a forked version of Chromium. So, it might not be that big of a concern.

[lostmsu]

One doesn't really preclude another in practice.

[JohnFen]

Firefox is legitimately not an option for me. It's literally unusably slow. So slow that it's not actually better than no browser at all.

[pjerem]

You have an issue. Firefox is not slow by any means. I use all the browsers for work and Firefox for my navigation. Firefox have never been slower than anything else.

[JohnFen]

Clearly, I do, yes! But I've given up on trying to nail down what the issue actually is after about a year of trying. It exists on all of my machines, so it's likely related to some other piece of software I commonly use. I just don't know which one.

I am not asserting that FF is bad and nobody should use it. I'm asserting that there are some people (at least one, anyway) who can't use it. Shaming people for not using FF is, therefore, uncalled for.

[somat]

my guess is filtered dns.

I just audited my system(firefox 110 on openbsd). and when dns is acting up(I disabled external dns leaving only my internal domains resolvable) firefox takes forever to do anything waiting on dns timeouts.

firefox is making requests to

  www.google.com #why? I don't have google set as my default search engine.
  detectportal.firefox.com
  9.9.9.9.https  #???? this is strange. DoH? but I should have it disabled.
  contile.services.mozilla.com.        
  firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com.
  content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net.
  push.services.mozilla.com.

And I probably missed a few.

Well, Sigh, I have a new weekend project. poking around in about:config trying to turn this bullshit off off.

[JohnFen]

That's entirely possible. It does smell like something's waiting for a timeout of some sort. But the times are very long. About 5 minutes to start the browser, and while not every page render incurs a delay, when they do, the delay is on the order of a minute or so.

In any case, I really have spent a lot of time digging into this. At some point, I just had to let it go.

[pieter_mj]

>It exists on all of my machines

What machines, did you assemble the hardware yourself? On a reasonably modern android phone, firefox is fluent even with dozens of tabs and there's nothing you can do to make it slow.

[JohnFen]

No, none of these machines are ones that I've assembled myself (and even if they were, so what?). They are all Linux machines. I only very rarely browse the web from my phone, so a browser's behavior on Android isn't relevant to me.

[kaba0]

These comments should are as useful as claiming that that magic alternative bullshit medicine cured my cancer. N=1, not reproducible and likely has zero relevance.

You should post to firefox support/some stackexchange site or whatever to fix your problem, not comment on the quality of a product you have failed to properly evaluate.

[JohnFen]

I was not seeking support here, nor offering some sort of review. I was pushing back against the shaming of people who don't use Firefox by pointing out that not everyone has the option.

> You should post to firefox support/some stackexchange site or whatever

Interesting that you assume I haven't done these things already.

Also interesting is the level of hostility in your reply, plus the downvotes my original comment got. The FF fanbase seems to have become a bit irrational and intolerant of anything said about FF that isn't fawning praise. That's disappointing.