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.
I don't disagree about the fact that Mozilla makes questionable moves. I still deeply resent that they laid off the servo team, and I treat their executives with as much suspicion as the rest of HN, see their recent moves with Firefox suggest in the address bar. But I think the fundamental difference is that, at the end of the day, I think Mozilla and Firefox are still the lesser evil in the borwser war; Firefox is still the best browser to run uBlock on, they have aggressively worked to end tracking and they have a mobile browser that actually supports extensions where possible (hello, Firefox Reality!) So I prefer to try as much as possible to work with Firefox instead of just accepting Chrome's dominance, especially given that it's just a worse browser for privacy.
> they have a mobile browser that actually supports extensions where possible
This isn't quite as simple. Firefox on Android will only install a subset of extensions from addons.mozilla.org, based on an allow-list maintained by Mozilla.
But other extensions on AMO (and therefore already complying with Mozilla's policies) work satisfactorily when installed in Iceraven (a fork of Firefox on Android).
So this shows that the limited list of extensions available for Firefox on Android is not limited by technical reasons (“where possible”), but by Mozilla's choice.
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But I agree with the broad point: yes, Mozilla is pretty sketchy, but Google is orders of magnitude sketchier.
The limited extensions on Android is for technical reasons. Instead of having zero extension support on release, they focused on supporting the APIs needed for popular extensions first and are working on adding the rest. It's an entire rewrite of the browser. There's still a lot of missing APIs they need to implement. Allowing every extension from AMO to work would be almost pointless because so many would be broken.
The fact of limiting the list of extensions that can be installed is indeed for technical reasons — I'm sure there are some extensions that don't work. But the list of which extensions can be installed is not restricted solely for technical reasons.
I use several extensions in Iceraven — Privacy Redirect; Bypass Paywalls Clean; I don't care about cookies — that work usefully. If there are any missing APIs, I haven't noticed them. These extensions can't be installed in Firefox for Android.
There's no technical difference between Iceraven and Firefox, except that Iceraven has a more generous allow-list. This isn't a technical restriction; it's a choice by Mozilla.
It's a valid choice — if they're aiming to curate a set of high-quality extensions, and prevent the use of lower-quality extensions — but it's a choice nonetheless.
> It's a valid choice — if they're aiming to curate a set of high-quality extensions, and prevent the use of lower-quality extensions — but it's a choice nonetheless.
Mozilla is also looking at monetizing their extension ecosystem by allowing the top makers of extensions to pay for placement. Perhaps, Mozilla could start letting only the highest paid extensions on Android.
Would this be "valid"? Uh . . . sure. It is also blatantly user hostile. I would rather Mozilla allow me to choose what I run, but Mozilla definitely isn't going to give the users that sort of freedom on release builds.
It seems that they've also talked themselves into believing that running extensions in the main process has all of a sudden become totally unsafe and absolutely irresponsible, while at the same time the solution employed on desktop (run extensions in a separate process) unfortunately isn't possible because on Android secondary processes might randomly be targeted by the low-memory killer at any time, which would break a lot of add-ons.
So a few extensions have been grudgingly permitted with extra scrutiny given during review, but they don't want to extend that effort to all add-ons, they don't want to back down to accepting the previous level of security, either, Android won't change its handling of child processes (and even if – any change there would take years to percolate throughout the phone ecosystem, plus a number of OEMs somewhat infamously are even more aggressive about killing seemingly unused processes), and re-architecting add-ons to cope with randomly being killed isn't an easy and immediate solution either.
This is only possible on Firefox Nightly, and you have to install them by making a Mozilla account and creating extension collections[0].
This is frustrating to do, when the desktop site didn't allow me to add a mobile-only extension[1] and I had to figure out how to do so by modifying HTTP requests. This is a reversion from older Firefox versions, where you could install any extension via the web store as you would on desktop.
Okay but what's the upshot? If it's just a meandering comment to the effect of "well, Mozilla does bad stuff too", then this is exactly the kind of comment that the parent commenter was talking about.
Take all of the concerns about Mozilla, add them up, and then bring them back to the larger conversation about what it means for the web to become increasingly dependent on Google.
That is the second step, and that second step is the critical step, and somehow in these conversations, that piece keeps getting lost. Or worse, people decide to dig in before they get to that piece, and then, after already having been dug in, they confront this question and decide to follow it to the logically consistent but extreme conclusion that these trivial details are a sufficient reason to abandon the web to Google. I suspect that is a position that they wouldn't otherwise have consciously reasoned themselves into, but I do think it's how people respond to the challenge of reconciling their criticisms of Mozilla with the bigger picture.
I don't think the Mr Robot thing was great, but I also don't think that's a reason to abandon the web to 100% dominance by Google. And is the Mr robot thing supposed to be an input into that bigger conversation about whether or not to abandon the web to Google? If yes, then I just have to say that I don't think that's a very good reason. If no, then I submit that we're losing track of the bigger question.
>it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition"
I have to admit that this is where you completely lost me. I think Mozilla is navigating some uncertain and difficult territory, and I don't think their choices are the best. But I guess I'll put it this way. If I find my brain spinning narratives like this, I take it as a sign that I need to get up and go on a walk outside.
It's difficult to have a rational conversation when many people are emotionally invested. I find it helpful to take a given description and replace one entity with another. For example:
> Eich: Ad on Brave's new tab page was just another experiment
> "This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Brave users through offers provided by a partner"
> "It was not a paid placement or advertisement."
You would recoil in disgust. Do the developers think the explanation is satisfactory? No one would seriously believe that a browser vendor would just willingly place ads for a company without any sort of compensation. In fact, that someone would even consider putting an ad in the web browser itself would probably be enough to push you to choose something else.
Circling back to the beginning, people blindly believed Google's "Do no Evil" and Google profited mightily by chipping away at the generated goodwill.
Thanks for the projection, but what I would actually do is the same as what multiple other commenters here are already doing, namely absorb the criticisms of Mozilla for what they are, and take those back to the bigger context of how I feel about conceding the browser space to Google.
Yours appears to be yet another example of the type of short attention span comment that I'm talking about, which is happening over and over and over in this thread. There's talk of Google abusing their dominant position in shaping the web and browers, and then there's talk of Mozilla as a counterbalance, and then there is a criticism of Mozilla, and then there is no clear upshot about how the criticism relates to the original context.
Asking people to remember and tie the point back to the original context yields comments like yours, viewing such requests as a challenge or emotional investment, or an inability to have rational conversation.
Why would I recoil in disgust? What if I prefer ads to total dependence on a single revenue source?
Also comparing Brave to Firefox is like comparing a browser with it's owns independent stack to a browser that's just a fork of a different browser, wait!
I think the 'controlled opposition' comment is pointing out that given a choice between doing the right thing for users vs. keeping Google happy (presumably to keep the search money comping in), they often seem to choose keeping Google happy. So while Mozilla has generally been less bad for user interests, it's still often far from being an advocate for them.
And yet it's devoid of truth. How many times has Google proposed some ridiculous new API that Mozilla has immediately and publicly rejected, often with strong language? I can count at least 2 off the top of my head from the past year alone.
We know the web is now so complex that it is impossible for a voluntary project to maintain a web browser, at least to a level of near-parity with Chrome.
It seems impossible, but I wonder if Mozilla could be salvaged?
I want a browser styled like the rugged and customisable UI of Firefox 4.x with the Gecko improvements of the Quantum releases. With desktop-to-mobile sync with real cryptography, before this nonsense of a 'Firefox account'. A browser that preserved features pleasing to techies and power users, while omitting features abhorrent to them, would be the ideal.
How could such a thing be funded, and how could we get the old hacker collective style of Mozilla back? Or how would we start something new and get the full time labour necessary to develop such a browser, with an independent rendering engine and JS VM? While keeping unethical incentives as far from sight as possible.
I don't pretend it is an easy question, but framing the right question is a start.
> We transform your passphrase on your computer into two different, unrelated values. With one value, you cannot derive the other0. We send an authentication token, derived from your passphrase, to the server as the password-equivalent. And the encryption key derived from your passphrase never leaves your computer.
Ah, looks like they still do. My mistake. I was harkening back to the old Sync protocol which just gave you a decryption key, rather than any account system. From this post it seems they've just integrated it with your password, if your link is describing the present method.
> back in the day you could self-host Firefox Sync
Yep -- and this is why I personally think there's something rotten in Mozilla.
At the beginning there were 3rd party extensions to sync bookmarks that just allowed you to point to any webdav server (which is trivial to self-host). At some point Mozilla decided to implement this functionality as a 1st party extension, thereby displacing all the other 3rd party extensions that were doing the same (and later on outright killing these extensions, by changing the APIs and making the new ones buggy).
And once the other extensions were killed, they started to make it harder and harder to self-host. Up to the point I gave up self-hosting Firefox Sync; it's just not worth the effort, and I really see absolutely no need for such a huge infrastructure for what could be done with plain clothes WebDAV.
That is the day Mozilla earned my distrust. I basically use Firefox (or its forks) just because there is no other choice.
Pocket isn't proprietary. The bundled extension is OSS and maintained in-tree. It's also not deeply integrated. You can turn it off or use artifact builds to create a custom Firefox with it completely gone, and nothing will break, because it's just a WebExtension.
The open source code is only useful when paired with a proprietary network service.
When Mozilla bought Pocket, there already existed a competing open source self-hostable network service, Wallabag. Pocket is to Wallabag as Twitter is to Mastodon.
My complaint was not that the code in Firefox was proprietary, but that it integrated with (and promoted) a proprietary network service, while there was a viable open source competitor.
At the time, Mozilla's mission included the aim “to promote choice and innovation on the internet”, which this integration seemed to go against.
The controversy at the time was that it didn't need to be embedded in the browser and it was a proprietary blob.
It literally took years to get to a point where the bundled parts were released as open source (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1343006 ). Obviously there are legal concerns etc, but many of the critics would have been much happier if the extension were released as open source first rather than adding proprietary code to the browser
For what technical reason would it be a proprietary blob? The Firefox frontend has been html/xul/css/js forever. Pocket would be implemented the same. I can't see why it would need to be a binary.
Who exerts the most control over Chromium? Google shareholders or the OSS community? How much Chromium development is done by people not employed by Google or now Microsoft?
Brave/Edge/Vivaldi/Opera are all Google controlled browsers. Just because you can slap your own logo and build a sync system on top of Chromium does not mean they get to have any say in how Chromium consumes the Internet.
Sure, less data gets sent directly to Google. But when Google says[1], Chromium will not allow you to completely block autoplaying videos, it takes years to for the clones add an option to block[2].
Most others are Chromium based. But I see no reason to switch to Chrome when we have Chromium available in every Linux distribution and Brave for Windows/Mobile.
Is there really any alternative to Chrome (outside of the Apple ecosystem)? Vivaldi is Chrome, Edge is Chrome, Opera is Chrome, Brave is Chrome.
Sure, technically they're Chromium, not Chrome, and probably you don't share your data with Google (though who can say for sure). But whichever you choose, you're still allowing Google to control the Web ecosystem, from web standards to ad blocking.
