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For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.

The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".

I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.

Why do I think this? Three reasons:

- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.

- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.

- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.

If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.

Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.

I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.

Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience.

I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.

It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.

100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!) has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping, split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing some new features.

> . Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades.

I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still better than what chrome or edge offer.

Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).

If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.

The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.

Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.

The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.

Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.

Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.

> The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.

Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.

> skin-deep UI refresh

Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?

I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.

This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.

> How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?

I use this to bring the normal tabs back:

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of “Zen mods” and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience.

https://zen-browser.app/

After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back then, power users were up in arms about things like the omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction. There doesn’t even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a real usable URL bar.

For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.

There’s an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a full length URL bar.

I had checked there before, just checked again, and I still only see an option for a smallish bar with the two floating options. Where there exactly?

Settings → Look and Feel → Multiple Toolbars or Collapsed Toolbar as shown in the screenshot[0].

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/BVmkmkLC/Screenshot-2025-03-15-at-12-34-26-...

Thanks. Wow, that is very much not clear

Perfect.. the real hacks always in the comments!

> I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage

Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.

The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.

It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.

I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.

> it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen

Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one, and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now, after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway filled.

Fits 212 characters on mine.

Yup, as I was told in another comment, it requires changing to "Multiple Toolbars or Collapsed Toolbar" instead of changing the URL bar setting, which is not exactly obvious. Posted from Zen for now ;)

Manual URL editing is unbelievably painful on mobile and all the kids only use their phones these days - I guess this includes all the cool kid engineers making browsers.

This is extremely true, especially when holding backspace and when you hold it a bit too long, the speed increases! Trying to remove query parameters, such as used for Google Analytics tracking, can be extremely frustrating.

try control + backspace

Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part of the idea is paid development.

they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.

The project's main owner said that the income from the project is enough for him to make it his main job after he finishes university.

TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks are much better suited to try out new concepts, which eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).

“Arc but for Firefox” is called Zen and it’s been my daily driver for months. Fantastic browser.

That’s exactly what Zen Browser is - Arc but off a fork of FF.

https://zen-browser.app/

I would rather see Orion on Firefox.

What would that entail?

isn't Zen exactly that? Arc, but firefox

> They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart.

> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.

Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.

I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription, payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.

Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.

Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project.

There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).

(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)

it's true. I never in a million years could have imagined that I would be paying for a search engine. now you can pry Kagi out of my cold dead hands.

gmail is only free for a subset of its users, as are other google services.

People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are fine paying for things.

Sure, for those things.

However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.

This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And, incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid browser that real people do buy.

Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".

Content is something that is traditionally paid.

Not on YouTube.

then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version

That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "because Google pays them not to".

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.

So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade

That's progress, but also: why is this the structure? It makes no sense to not send donations to the thing they think they're donating to, and I really can't believe that there's no way they could have structured it to make that work.

Still though. 70% is a lot to be dependent on Google for. And the way Google operates these days, I'm honestly surprised that their interest in Firefox remains.

Google wants Firefox to remain viable (or at least one other browser) so that they can avoid monopoly issues with Chrome. If they pay Firefox to keep Google as default search engine, they keep 80% of the money they’d get by having those users use Chrome, and they keep the other browser alive, but not enough to really keep up with Chrome’s feature set.

That’s the most likely bet they are making, similar to Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense for them.

This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?

The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around.

Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.

Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of donations are used to fund development for Firefox!?

How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]?

[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...

[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

To the best of my knowledge that is correct, yes. The way that they've structured it they can't legally do otherwise.

Wait until you hear how many Wikipedia editors and servers are paid from the many millions of donations they aggressively beg for every year..

> fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was

Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].

(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

Donation go to the foundation, not to Mozilla Corporation which does all the browser engineering work. If you donate you give money to the team that does open web advocacy and related programs.

[dead]

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox

This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.

I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...

> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.

However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.

When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.

Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.

had a positive experience recently on an issue and getting it fixed, people were helpful and instructive. For drive-by newbies there's an initial penalty to dig into Mozilla tooling. Lowering the threshold there will attract more contributors.

This is really telling of the current vibe I get from Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond “It’s a bit more private than default Chrome”

Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.

That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea.

Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.

As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.

I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.

I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.

Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.

Wow, I honestly had no idea about that and you're exactly right, and everything I can see suggests that those were small donors to Thunderbird. It's hard to extrapolate, but it certainly seems like 10 to 20 million per year could be in play.

I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia.

I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M

>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary.

Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.

We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an underutilized option is intended to make the point that there's not enough resources for software development. But if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're spending more than would ever be generated from such revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

> Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million.

Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on).

> but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting

Agreed. I think if it was 1M, it wouldn't have any impact, but and if it was 100M then people would complain that it's not being used on $INSERT_THING_THEY_WANT_HERE.

> It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.

What Firefox is doing isn't growing their market share, so hitching another $1/10/100M isn't going to do anything to that without a strategy to actually make it happen. I think, honestly, there's a decent chance for a new project to survive in here. It could even be a Firefox fork, but it needs to be free of the baggage and strategy of Mozilla, and Firefox IMO - just as Edge has somehow made a resurgance as a chromium browser. I think Ladybird could work out too, if they can find a way to break through.

Spoken as a die hard FF user for almost 20 years!

I wholeheartedly agree with most or all of this and it's refreshing to see thoughtful commentary amidst a tidal wave of crazy speculation. I actually think it would be much more fair, in the event that FF raised $100MM from donations, to have to be accountable to user perceptions of where those resources are going. Although my experience from hn commentary is that people are extremely confused about this and vocal minorities create an illusion of consensus, and express their concerns in drive-by fashion that isn't super amenable to a focused conversation that could be tied to a credible strategy.

The best version of the argument I think one can make relates to Firefox OS. There, at long last, in contrast to spurious complaints about the VPN, Pocket, etc. etc., it seems like Mozilla really did invest serious resources in it at the expense of browser development, and it did happen during the critical period of time where they collapsed from 35ish percent to 3 percent. But it was on behalf of a major bet of the kind that I would like to think everyone welcomed, so, a real risk, but for a respectable strategy. And, they did produce Quantum, a rewrite from the ground up with spectacular improvements in speed and stability (which makes the present day arguments feel like they are at least vestigal echoes of an old argument that was, in its time, legitimate). But you never hear critics talk in a measured way like that.

I do agree that the vocal minority would claim the donations are not being used on $INSERT_THING, which is always a different thing every time you ask (I recently heard that it was all the VC fund's fault which was a new one), and they're already talking like that right now. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be open to that revenue. I think it's plausible they could pull something on the order of $10MM or multiple tens of millions which I have to imagine is as good as what they're getting from Pocket and the VPN etc.

I suppose the only disagreement, or frustration I have here is with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections, every bit as detached from a strategy to grow market share as Mozilla's actual strategy.

I actually agree with you fully.

> with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections

To bring this back full circle, the same group are the ones who want to fund Firefox-not-Mozilla. And if every comment in this thread cost $200 to post and went straight to Firefox development, it wouldn’t fund a single developer for a year.

The use for donations could be for a single person whose job is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults, Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them.

That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.

Do I understand correctly that you believe Mozilla doesn't currently have the resources necessary to do that from their $500MM in annual revenue? It sounds like you are talking about an ombudsman or something, which highlights my point here, which is that these are philosophical criticisms disguised as commentary on raising revenue.

Also the mission you are describing sounds like something that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they already own the browser and they could account for this in their ground-level philosophy.

They could, but they don't want to do that because they get paid by Google to not do it or because those actions get them money in some other way (from advertisers or whatever), or because they think only power users like some features.

Firefox publishes their 990 form which discloses all their sources of revenue and Google does not pay Firefox for any of the things you described. Also, it feels kind of nonsensical to suggest that it would have a development strategy of building out their ad tech and simultaneously reverting it, and I don't see how explanations about them wanting or not wanting to do it make that proposed approach for any more sense.

They pay them for making Google the default search engine, and it is hypothesized that the payment may also influence them to not provide ad-blocking by default and possibly other things that are not beneficial for Google's business.

>and it is hypothesized

By whom and on what basis? Those are non-optional questions that should have strong answers as preconditions to you posting about it, if the objective is to offer something more than simple bullshitting (in the Harvey Frankfurt sense of indifference to truth).

This also doesn't answer like 90% of my concerns from my previous comments. Who has ever intentionally had a software development approach of having one team develop features and another person revert those features, working in tandem? And why would they need donations that are 0.20% of what they already get in revenue to finance it? I feel like you're just improv riffing here.

The donations would go directly to the individual doing this with no relationship with Mozilla (e.g. with Patreon or similar), not to Mozilla itself.

I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.

"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox."

For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.

As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.

Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.

Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.

> The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited).

Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible.

Here at ardour.org, we use this:

> either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code.

(technically, name your own price for the binaries)

and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.

Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL

Oops, thanks for the correction.

"Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible."

I understand that, and I accept it as a problem. I only used LibreOffice and Gimp as examples of large projects that have issues, I should have made it clear I wasn't suggesting they convert to a different licensing model. Clearly, under GPL-type licensing converting to another licensing structure would be nigh on impossible. Nevertheless, that they can't raises issues which I'll mention.

My suggestion arose out of what I perceive as a problem with some open-source projects. Let's take a look:

There are many open-source and commercial programs that are now effectively abandoned-ware but given the right incentive some could be resurrected and turned into useful products. View this another way: a lot of human effort has gone into making both commercial and open-source programs and letting all that effort go to waste doesn't make sense if there's a viable alternative. That said, we know that finding the right 'incentive' has proved difficult and elusive.

Both developers of open-source and commercial programs often have good reasons for stopping further development of their programs. For open-source developers often the incentive wains and having to continually maintain a program without financial reward turns into drudgery. Likewise, a developer of a small commercial program will stop further development for various reasons some of which are similar to those of open-source developers.

I'll give you an example, I still use a Windows file management utility produced by an individual developer which I purchased about 15 years ago and unfortunately he has ceased further development of the program. Trouble is that program is for my purposes the best-of-class for reasons I can't dwell upon here but it needs updating to a Unicode base (I still use it regularly but it throws errors with filenames containing non-ASCII characters).

I've exchanged emails with the developer and I fully understand why he's ceased development (he has good reasons). A very similar situation exists with some open-source developers, they've ceased development of their programs for similar reasons. Unfortunately, in both instance users are left with abandoned-ware.

With both open-source and proprietary software, many programmers still hold residual vested interests in their code even through they've ceased developing it. Often, this revolves around the fact that they don't want others to benefit financially at their expense even though for various reasons it's difficult for them to actually profit directly. (Let's face it, that's understandable—it's pretty much human nature.)

The result is an impasse: open-source code stagnates in the hope others will continue its development, which may or may not happen (and often it doesn't). Similarly, commercial code is neglected and or goes into limbo. And more often than not it ends up dead and abandoned.

Clearly, the gulf between open-source/GPL and proprietary software licensing is not only wide but also contentious. In respect of these problems I've no better solution than anyone else except to say that I believe there ought to be some better system or mechanism whereby open-source developers can at least receive some renumeration for their efforts. Providing an additional financial incentive to developers would also significantly benefit users.

Obviously—given current licensing arrangements—the halfway measure I've suggested would only be applicable to new projects, and that alone poses additional problems. The fact remains we need to find some way of providing better incentives to developers so as to ensure important open-source projects are developed in a timely and professional way as is so for the best commercial software. By that, I'm certainly not saying that all open-source projects aren't being developed in a professional manner as clearly many are. But then there are many that are struggling. How we best deal with them remains open.

Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership.

I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.

But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.

I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.

There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.

FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.

If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.

Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover.

How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things

It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.

Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now

The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.

Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).

Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?

Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.

That’s not what OP is suggesting - that’s a Firefox fork.

why wouldn't those people just donate to Mozilla?

Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).

AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox development.

Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for!

The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.

But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.

So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.

I've been using Zen for a few months now and love it. There are some rough edges (the article mentions how customizing it is confusing because multiple mechanisms affect different parts of the app). However, it's getting regular updates, and once it's set up, it's really a pleasure to use.

Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.

I highly recommend it.

Same here. My main gripe has been address in the latest update - the icon! The old stylised 'Z' just didn't look a like a browser icon when alt-tabbing, and I had to think about where my browser is, rather than instinctively going straight to it. At this point my brain only seems to accept that browser icons are circle-based.

The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic

Try Sidebery extension. It has nested tabs, workspaces and much much more.

I tried Sidebery for a couple of months off the back of multiple recommendations and while it has some decent features, I found it surprisingly lacking in terms of basic features like "close multiple tabs". I also found it regularly would semi-regularly prevent me from clicking on tabs which was frustrating until I restarted the extension or Firefox.

In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.

I use Sidebery a lot and I'd like to know what exactly you mean by "close multiple tabs"? I currently drag with right click in Sidebery and then click close tabs in the popup menu, however I don't really like doing this way. How is it done in Tree Style Tabs?

I have TST set up thus: closing a tab will close all its child tabs, if that branch is collapsed. Pretty sure Sidebery can be configured the same way.

Oh! As another Sideberry user thanks for sharing this. I usually Ctrl+click or Shift+click tabs before middle mouse clicking to delete all selected.

In Tree Style Tab, you can shift-click to select a contiguous range of tabs and then use the right-click menu to close them all.

> In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.

Try Simple Tab Groups. Been using it in conjunction with Tree Style Tab for a long time.

Tab Mix Plus is the OG GOAT of tab management. Its claim to fame is that it’s still the only add-in that gives you multiple tab rows.

Have you compared the experience to using Sidebery? Every FF alternative I've tried comes up short to the power of what Sidebery can do with tree style tabs.

Honestly, Zen should be upstreamed. It would be a great way to introduce FOMO.

Actually, some of the Zen features are lesser-known native features of Firefox: including the collapsible vertical tabs.

[dead]

Ironic to provide compact interface leaving bighugefat spacing intact.

The Zen fork should be based on the Mullvad browser, which is itself a fork of Firefox, or the Tor Browser, same thing I guess. Or they should collaborate. It would be nice to have the UI improvements on an already more privacy focused fork.

I recently did this exercise as well. There are a lot of browsers not mentioned that you can find here,[0] but there's one big missing one imo.

The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.

I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/firefox/

[1] https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/

Tangent, how does “mullvad” sound to native speakers (and non-natives too)? I can’t tell why, but it feels like such an unfortunate combination of phonemes that I avoid even looking into it subconsciously. Can barely force myself to pronounce it, is that just me?

To native Swedish speakers it will look and sound like just another common Swedish word. And in the context it will even sound like a relevant choice of name.

/me is Danish, and the Danish equivalent would be ‘muldvarp’.

It's just another foreign-sounding word in a language full of kidnapped vocabulary

Mullvad is Swedish for "mole". Mull is a word for soil, and "vad" seems to come from "vada", wade. So translated it would be "soilwade".

To me, it sounds like just another word.

> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page

So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).

Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.

I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.

Yeah "donations" is not the right word, it's more like "sponsorship"... It does work though, I haven't heard of CubeSoft before I used Floorp and I have one of its PDF tools installed now. This is how advertising should work, not the tracking ads Mozilla (and idc if they're trying to make it "privacy-preserving" or the data aggregated, it's still tracking), Google, and co. want

I take your point, but it is worth noting that gifts, services, and goods are often exchanged for money and termed "donations" when the dollar amount greatly exceeds what one would normally pay, with the understanding that the proceeds go to a certain cause/group/organization.

$100 for an ad generally seems like a steal of a deal. If anything it's underpaying

> I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.

It’s not tax deductible, though (and even if you didn’t get anything in return, I don’t think Floorp is a registred charity anyway).

It was a joke, i know it's not deductible :)

Made me realize I never deduced all the open source project i gave to tho.

A more insidious aspect of grocery shoppings is that companies can pay for better placement on the store shelves & floor.

Our local grocery duopoly (Australia) not only charge for placement, but are now demanding that suppliers pay for transport between the supermarkets central and regional distribution warehouses, but will only take delivery centrally.

That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.

Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).

can donate* for better placement

Sounds like a good way to increase donations to shareholders.

The ecosystem of forks is currently healthy but what concerns me is a lack of Firefox browser support leading to lagging in standards support over time as the browser goes out of fashion for ideological or marketing reasons that this article touches upon.

All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/

It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?

Firefox seems to be good enough - is there anyone who wants to fork Firefox out of a frustration over how it handles some web standard and a feeling that they could do it better?

Hard forking a browser and implementing all future features on your own is daunting enough that even Microsoft - a company with more engineering resources than all but a handful of others, and for whom having a branded browser is existentially important - decided not to do it and just to reskin Chrome.

So I expect that any truly new browser comes not out of a desire to improve Firefox or Chromium, but from an independent, not economically useful, hacker-driven desire to create something cool. Either Ladybird or someone's RIIR project.

Microsoft contributes a lot of web standard implementations upstream to Chromium. They are not just letting Google do all the work as your comment makes it sound like. They could have chosen to do the same with Firefox, which means the reason to fork Chromium and not Firefox had other reasons.

Hmm, yes. My point was that there’s no pressing need for this in forks because Firefox is (still) pretty alive and well and they strongly depend on the important standards work being done there.

But in a future where a critical mass of people moved to forks because they were dissatisfied with Firefox? I think the community is too small and fragmented across forks for that.

Maybe Ladybird indeed then…

Firefox has made a few headlines over the past year for privacy-unfriendly moves. That's the context you're missing, despite it being in some of the first sentences of the linked article.

> privacy-unfriendly moves

Which is a UX issue, not a Web standards issue. None of the major forks were made due to a difference opinion about how the standards should be implemented, so they are all dependent on Mozilla to implement the standards.

I suppose, but I wouldn't try to predict the response to Firefox becoming unmaintained and interested parties who might step up to carry the torch before it actually happens. It's the primary browser of the largest three commercial Linux distros.

> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website?

IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…

Wait, aren't you a developer of Waterfox? Why don't you just tell us...

I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206110

(Just to avoid c+p massive blocks of text)

FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not seeing any concrete information about how it's different from upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it shouldn't require much work?

well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with.

And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.

Well, System1 was/is a search aggregator. That falls under ad-tech but at the time no-one cared about the former and only the latter.

Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.

I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?

Yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable with Waterfox because of that episode. In the HN thread the creator responded to complaints about this privacy-unfriendly turn by saying that they "tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as" being about privacy or user control. That's fine, but an immediate turnoff for me even now that the advertising company is apparently out of the picture.

If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?

Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343476

Well the issue I’ve always found is that privacy is a sliding scale. At the time especially, everyone was after “absolute” privacy - i.e. everything Tor offers. But people were coming in to use Waterfox with that expectation and it wasn’t meeting it - but communicating how “much” privacy you’re being offered is difficult. I did settle on the current terminology and when people ask in user forums I try and make it clear that it’s a balance of usability and privacy - as much as possible without breaking websites.

Not sure I agree with your understanding wrt Waterfox not being about user control? Always has been and the feature set matches that and that hasn’t changed.

Well, this is the opening line from that comment:

> > Those needs are privacy related and having control over the software you use.

> That’s fair enough, but I’ve tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as such to try and avoid issues like this.

I guess maybe you were only talking about privacy and not about "having control over the software"?

I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).

I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.

In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)

I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.

I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.

Unchecking resistFingerprinting in the settings disables these. You can also use the new firefox FPP settings to enable most if RFP stuff but opt out of specific stuff like dark mode, timezone, etc. You can even add per-site exceptions.

For example, my config is at https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-flake/src/branch/mast...

I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it just works!

Unironically tho when were the last time you see people trying random doors if they are unlocked. There is absolutely no need to lock your door if you are not vocal about it.

That kind of thinking (neglecting a broken lock on the back door, because I figured chances were low that someone would take advantage) got my apartment "broken" in to a few years ago.

This is heavily dependent on your neighborhood, obviously. I've never seen people trying random doors because I'm always asleep when they do it.

Are you not using librewold-overrides.cfg to disable/enable features that you want/need? All of the things you mentioned are just flags you can set in the file to turn them on or off. https://librewolf.net/docs/settings/

Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn't aware of this feature.

I enabled Firefox sync and lost all my history. It was a user error: I should have disabled configuration sync (clear history when you close the browser).

After this incident, I decided I had enough, so I uninstalled LibreWolf. I recovered my lost history from different instances, but I don't want to spend my time making this browser work.

LibreWolf is a decent browser with annoying default settings, which made me lose more time than I wanted to make it work.

It does break many sites. Especially if you disable WebGL. You do get used to it but that's a tall task for most users.

It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.

Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.

The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.

You are free to enable WebGl in the settings and install a Plugin that allows for blocking/allowing WebGl.

The default should be privacy if you install a browser that focuses on privacy.

Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer you networking disabled by default but the ability to enable completely unrestricted networking in the settings (you can install a plugin for CORS and the like if you want) or to natively provide the privacy controls you need to actually use the browser? If the latter, why is it different depending which attack surface you ask about? If the former, why not just make that plugin part of the browser itself?

> Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer you networking disabled by default

Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network requests" should be the default idle state of the browser until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)

I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And let's be honest here, a very significant majority of websites does not need WebGL.)

Everyone is welcome to have their own definition of what browsing the web requires be supported but if it wasn't part of browsing the web it shouldn't be part of the browser you can enable in the first place. That it is part of the browser you can enable is why it should have privacy support by the same browser, not because I personally think it should be part of what browsing the web requires.

I have left WebGl disabled and do not miss anything so far (maybe in the future?). Just not my use case.

Network disabled is a straw man argument.

If somebody already has made the effort of creating an extension and maintaining it, why not use that?

If WebGL is a straw man to browsing the web why is the feature still included in the browser itself at all then? You certainly don't have to utilize every feature of the browser yourself but it is part of that browser nonetheless, it's just not a natively securable part.

Seems like the majority thinks it is like that. Otherwise LibreWolf would not have many users.

Please pick a different browser if it is not for you. Waterfox has less restrictions and might be a better fit.

> devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy

It’s a position, not a fetish.

I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every time.

I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.

Can definitely attest to this. Librewolf is my daily and I run it pretty aggressively (uBO options/lists, strict blocking DNS, etc) and sometimes I'm left scratching my head where things break. Recently had an aha-moment that felt triumphant when disabling the limit cross-origin referers, as silly as it sounds. Alas, I guess I prefer it this way.

For graphical stuff like this, try enabling WebGL, just understand that you break a lot of anti-fingerprinting efforts if you do this.

That is, as so many things with tech, a matter of giving proper UI for humans as much priority as the feature itself.

It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.

A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.

I also ran into this, but it was manageable (after a bit of research of course).

Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...

Finger printing and privacy protection:

- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)

- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites

- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox

The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.

However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:

- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net

Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.

You can have a whitelist. Just go to cookie settings and set the exceptions.

Thanks, I did not know that :-)

I remember being thrown off by this.

A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage application.

the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in: user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);

Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find out how. Too opinionated.

Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.

Try a spoofed user-agent, if disabling ETP and RFP doesn't help.

Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.

As someone responsible for login/registration at a large online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks. Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-login with credentials from password dumps, try to register accounts controlled by bots.

Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.

If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.

What is wrong with a bot creating an account? Is their money not as green?

I'd guess that their problem is data pollution (marketing unhappy, ads impressions unaligned, data needs to be cleaned anyway before PowerPoint presentations for shareholders are made). And technically: unnecessary database growth which impacts migration efficiency, backup size and duration and stuff like that.

They don't seem to care about ad impressions being unaligned when their ads hit people who consider all forms of advertising to be a form of offensive and unauthorized graffiti on the mind, AKA vandalism.

I'm currently testing out Floorp and so far no issues with sites - beside twitch but that site doesn't like anything that isn't "default"

> Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.

On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome / less hostile.

I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation".

I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff; mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS - not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.

It does that. Users have the simple option of disabling it in settings with one checkbox.

Where is this 'one checkbox'?

There is a search bar in the settings page. Search 'fingerprint', uncheck 'Enable ResistFingerprinting'

I found on 136.0.0-ish that some settings persist despite checking/unchecking that box and restarting LibreWolf, but YMMV. I also manually inspect 'about:config' and search there for relevant settings (like 'fingerprint'). For fingerprinting, browser breakage is unlikely so toggling these hidden flags is easy.

Librewolf Lite / Light REALLY should be a release too. Less aggressive, more friendly to people who are moving towards a more secure experience. E.G. let session managers work properly, allow that 10 year old password database in the browser to be used during the 30 year transition* (I exaggerate, but until there's a bulk import tool to MIGRATE) to a stronger password manager. Generally don't enable the tiny fingerprint gains (~1/20th of world population, but they can already fingerprint that from the IP you're using and/or ping ANYWAY, so just leave the damned time zone on!) which have a huge trade off in annoyance for the end user.

Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.

It uses UTC, as everyone should.

> LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites

I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking anything, but instead as,

"LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against broken, dark-pattern websites"

I'm not convinced that "trusting the browser about the timezone it says it's in" is a dark pattern when it's done in service of scheduling meetings that the user directly requested.

The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.

Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.

These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized derivatives" or "spin-offs"?

Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.

Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.

Mozilla do more then just the code base -- There are larger eco-system for HTTP, HTML5, CSS, Certificate Authority, etc.

The effort for entry is quite high for those...

The problem with Firefox forks I have: - you don't know when they are gonna keel over and die. - non-existent support from distro package repositories. Void Linux for example has an understandable policy of not providing Firefox and Chromium forks. I really don't wanna install them from appimages or fatpak.

I have found using firefox provided by my distro with something like arkenfox to be a decent medium but it sucks that this is required in the first place. I wonder if distro repository maintainers try to package Firefox with better defaults but I don't know how to look for that.

That, and in many cases they get "stuck" at the firefox version they are based on which means that newer things might not work and more importantly security fixes might not be applied.

> you don't know when they are gonna keel over and die

Would it really matter? Browsers are pretty much a commodity item. Of all the big pieces of software in your life, I can't imagine one easier to replace than a browser.

You have to then go through the trouble of redoing persistent logins, transferring bookmarks, history, plugins, etc. That's a nontrivial amount of effort right there.

At least with firefox based browsers I believe the actual user profile folder is pretty compatible across browsers, copying that should copy every aspect of what makes your browser yours, though it might contain extras that won't be utilized by vanilla firefox.

If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for $20/year) to help support the project without giving away personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development; however, having this option would provide people with the choice to support the project without giving up personal data, and Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.

More money is not the problem, Firefox receives 600+ million USD per year. Is how they waste the money and going back on their pledges and what Mozilla stood for

The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine the very purpose of standardization.

Consider our current situation:

- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines

- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source

- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility

What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.

I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.

There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died, because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and without a business model implementing them has been seen historically as overly expensive.

In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)

If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).

How is that any different from now? Look what happened recently with Mozilla and Firefox...

I think that people should look at what happened recently and realize that absolute nothing noteworthy happened.

And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.

Whoa, slow down there. You can't just go around asking people to read first-party sources and think critically on their own about an issue without getting their opinion from their feed or influencer of choice. That's an unreasonable and insane expectation! /s

The first-party source is Mozilla themselves skirting around saying, but very heavily implying they are now selling unspecified data about me to unspecified actors, in a legally binding way, then walking it back with a pinky promise that is not legally binding, so doesn't actually mean anything.

Have you read the first-party sources?

The narrative you gave above is by definition not a first party source.

Here's a first party source explaining your misunderstanding of the situation: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

And here's another credible source explaining Mozilla's mistake in making this decision based on language that was only present in a draft version of the CCPA, as opposed to the final version, but which also made it to Wikipedia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276624

Most of the conversation on this topic never moved past the first misunderstanding, just a bunch of irrational kvetching at Mozilla by people who read an (incorrect) summary of the situation.

Why do you trust everything the allegedly bad guys say? By reading it and thinking critically as you said we all should, I can easily see that they are following the pattern that many bad guys follow: write some legalese allowing them to do bad stuff, then write some non-binding non-legalese saying they won't. Then only point at the latter to silence complaints. And then, the next step in the pattern is to actually do the bad stuff, while continuing to point at the non-binding non-legalese.

Whereas you seem to be taking what they said at face value, which is not critical thinking.

Not much changed on Mozilla's side, only the law (e.g., CCPA, GDPR), because technically speaking (as far as CCPA is concerned), Firefox has already been “selling” users' data.

Furthermore, at this point, that legalese talks about features that the user expects. Otherwise, in the EU, Firefox would be forced to ask for explicit consent. GDPR is so strong that when Firefox will actually sell your data, you'll know it because in the EU it will have to tell users exactly how or why.

Note that Mozilla was already hit with a privacy complaint in the EU due to PPA [1] because it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Whether they'll be found guilty by EU's DPAs, it really depends on whether they actually anonymize that data, as they claim to do, or not. Note here that the GDPR doesn't accept pseudo-anonymization as being valid anonymization.

Of course, it may take a while to find the outcome of such complaints, just note that as far as the GDPR is concerned, that Privacy Policy of theirs doesn't count for squat. It really doesn't matter what they claim in their Privacy Policy, unless they are lying, i.e., if they actually “sell the data” of users in a way that users don't expect as part of the service, then the GDPR asks for explicit consent (opt-in).

Technically speaking, they've already sold user data since 2006 because they've been installing Google's Search as the default, used, for example, for search suggestions. So everything you type in that address bar, goes to Google, and they get paid for it. Of course, search suggestions are part of the service that the user expects, but note that the user's search history can also be used for user profiling by Google. So as far as the CCPA is concerned, that's selling user data. And, very importantly, Firefox has been funded by ad-tech since 2006, much like all Chromiums and even Safari.

What's actually new is that Mozilla wants to diversify. Which is good, as the Search deal is in jeopardy and those hundreds of millions of $ they need to fund the browser aren't going to come from donations. So they would like an alternative to cut the middleman, i.e., Google. If that alternative is also privacy preserving and at the very least opt-out (though I'd prefer opt-in), then that's even better than the status quo.

People unhappy with this deal are people that hate advertising, or any reasonable monetization strategy, as if a viable browser with an independent engine could be funded via the donations of people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

---

TLDR:

1. Nothing actually changed, and that Privacy Policy doesn't count for squat.

2. Results matter, not words, results such as that wonderful offline translation feature, which is a great showcase of privacy preserving AI tech that only Mozilla pulled ;-)

PS: Isn't it odd that whenever the underdogs get boycotted, the winners are always the Big Tech solutions that are far worse in every aspect?

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/mozilla-hit-with-privacy-c...

First of all, while many valuable perspectives are offered here, the legal nuances of the CCPA are complex and usually best assessed by those with formal legal expertise. It seems to me that individuals without legal training are the primary source of the allegation, so I believe that allegation itself needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as those making the accusation are quite possibly missing key legal context. This isn't intended as an insult, rather, just an objective observation from my perspective. Please ask a lawyer or law school friend to review all of this, including both the blog post and other HN post I linked above, as well as the links in that HN post, which include a law blog citing the drafting error. I encourage everyone with legal expertise to review these points and share additional insights. I am offering numerous, reputable, cross-checked sources for my position, something I haven't seen or heard from the people arguing for your position. If you have more information to share, please do share it. I want to have as holistic an understanding as possible here, after all.

Second, Mozilla as an entity has a lengthy track record of being the only big good guy in the "browser wars" for a long time. The entire ethos of Mozilla - both the foundation and the corporation (not the same business entity, another detail the many voices weighing in on this subject aren't even aware that they didn't know, but which is directly relevant to the legalese of the CCPA) - was to preserve a free, open-source, less untrustworthy major browser, in the face of IE and Chrome, both products of companies have taken a more opaque approach to their proprietary code and have been involved in decades worth of controversial experiments on (and changes to) user privacy, unlike Mozilla. Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) want to hide their code from you because their code contains a bunch of functionality that is optimal for the business' interests, but malicious from the perspective of end users who value privacy, freedom, and their right to determine what code runs on their own machine.

This brings me to my third point, that Mozilla's Firefox is COMPLETELY open source. If Mozilla was trying to slurp up user data to sell it, they wouldn't keep their product open-source, because the community would just strip out all the bits they don't like. Contrast to Alphabet (Google), who are literally deprecating Manifest V2 to prevent the community from developing ad blockers that actually block all ads, or Microsoft's documented historical practice of waging war on open standards through "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Lengthy, obvious, and well-documented patterns of abuse like that exist for both Microsoft / Alphabet (Google). Contrast to the lengthy pattern of standing up against that very same abuse from Mozilla. Keeping Firefox open source is antithetical to the interests of an entity which was trying to surreptitiously slurp up user data the way Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) do. While each organization has merits of their own, the availability of transparent, open source code (specifically, for the final product - not just an open core like Chromium) can help ensure that power users and developers like us have ways to verify and challenge any potentially problematic practices - something that Mozilla has remained committed to, but which Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) had never fully embraced to begin with.

Fourth, If you've read Firefox's blog posts, if you've read the discussion I linked to above, if you've read the articles about the CCPA drafting error, if you've read the Wikipedia article, confirming that it did contain the incorrect draft language, if you understand that lawyers interpret everything legalistically (not the way ordinary people do), I believe this all paints a picture of an honest misinterpretation on Mozilla's part of the obligations the CCPA might put on them, in the least generous interpretation of the draft language of the CCPA. This does make me sympathetic to the possibility that Mozilla made an honest mistake, but sympathy and trust are not the same, which brings me to my fifth point below.

I'm not "trusting" anything Mozilla says. I'm reading into, understanding, and verifying all of it. And again, even if Mozilla was trying to do such a thing, their current open-source architecture makes those efforts completely irrelevant to developers like myself and many others here who can read, understand, and make modifications to, and rebuild from source. Given the established track record of Mozilla and the documented shortcomings with proprietary browsers in this regard, one might consider whether some of the criticisms (that are encouraging people to trust a narrative that results in a snap judgement against Mozilla without reading into the details) could be influenced by broader competitive dynamics. Nonetheless, it’s important to evaluate each claim on its validated merits.

This brings me to addressing your concerns directly: you make a perfectly valid argument in favor of remaining vigilant, and I support this! Keeping an eye on Firefox source code modifications, monitoring the situation over time, and so on. These can be done while simultaneously assuming Mozilla made a genuine mistake here, and isn't secretly plotting against our interests. The narrative that Mozilla has suddenly turned evil is broadly inconsistent with Mozilla's lengthy track record of standing AGAINST such abuses from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). That narrative alone is also NOT a reason to spread FUD about a browser that, as of this moment, remains WAY more trustworthy than the "main" alternatives that most uninformed users would migrate to, should they leave Firefox.

A good-faith, open, evidence-based discussion is key to ensuring our whole community understands these complex issues, and I'd accordingly invite you to share more evidence to support your interpretation, which I will read and consider in good faith.

Besides, it will just end up being an xkcd 927, lol.

The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink, would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?

The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.

Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.

For those as confused as I, Blink is the webkit fork that powers the chromium-style browsers. Sort of like chrome's gecko.

Because reference implementations are often less efficient.

If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future implementors can make different tradeoffs.

What's the alternative? Threatening Gecko developers or contributors into quitting their work on Gecko and demanding they work on Blink or WebKit instead?

Some of us passionately hate Google and Apple for their unethical business practices and would rather cease OSS contributions altogether than contribute to these tyrants.

I've been using zen lately mostly for the combination of "essentials" + "workspace" tab management scheme. I love having a space for tabs while also having a spot to pin stuff like email and bluesky which doesn't necessarily fit into one category or other.

Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery which was good but not quite there for me.

Firefox has vertical tabs and tab groups now; those aren't specific to Zen

Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither vertical tabs nor tab groups are fully ready and shipped.

From a quick search, it seems that you need to make edits in `about:config` to enable tab groups and use nightly to access vertical tabs.

Vertical tabs are available in the latest stable release. They're pretty basic compared to tree style tabs and sideberry, though.

OK, this is it. The perfect firefox fork. The last thing I need is the ability to self host a ff sync server so my bookmarks are synced with my phone.

Lucky us, you can do this today, because, of course, it is Mozilla, so it is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

These are arc features (which were copied/ported to zen) and are the main reason I use ARC atm on my Mac. On PC I use zen because arc sucks on PC. It's hard to lose these features imo.

In case you didn't know, Arc isn't being developed since 5 months now. The company has moved on to another project called Dia.

If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo, and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.

Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)

Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.

Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.

If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.

I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D JK. But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think it affects performance at all. The privacy invasion I need to look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as well.

> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page—but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored" label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to find any information about the project governance or legal structure of Ablaze.

So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?

It's not the exact same revenue model. Floorp doesn't use tracking whatsoever for sponsored ads in the home page. And donations to Floorp directly goes to development, unlike in Mozilla.

Sponsored ads and donations are different revenue models. Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had a problem with it.

>Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had a problem with it.

There are a ton of people who complain about Mozilla taking donations. It shows up in most HN threads about the mismanagement of Firefox.

I think the issue is that the donations Mozilla receive don't go to Firefox's development. This is not the case with Floorp, Ladybird and Pale Moon where donations and sponsorship money (PM used to accept sponsors but they don't now) do go to development.

In Firefox, you can choose a local html file as your home page, but not as a new tab page. This is allegedly because of some security concerns. Using extentions allows for a limited workaround where the page needs to be re-imported each time it is edited.

The surprising part to me is that the same applies to the forks too.

If opening a local file for the home page not a security concern, why should it be for the new tab page. I understand that giving local files access to extensions could lead to issues, however, it should not need an extension to use a local file as a new tab page.

Note: I maintain my bookmarks in a local html file, which I make into my home page, new tab page, across browsers, and then sync this file across devices using Syncthing.

These restrictions are super-annoying indeed, especially with no way to override them. Example: I like mouse gestures. People say oh yes, you can have mouse gestures in Firefox, here, there are several extensions. Well, open a new tab with a mouse gesture. Cool. Now try close it. Same goes for any other "special" page.

I've tried using LibreWolf on MacOS but there's a few annoying bugs.

HN has a really small text size for me and I usually read HN at 120-133% text size. LibreWolf does not remember this setting on per-site basis and even opening HN-to-HN link in a new tab doesn't preserve text size and I need to increase text size constantly.

In addition, posting images to Bluesky doesn't work. Every attempt results in an image of proper size but consisting of only vertical lines. For this, I need to fall back to Firefox or use Safari.

Even if the first of above problems is a "feature", the latter is definitely a bug. I haven't filled a report yet. But for now, I'm planning to test Zen.

Check `browser.zoom.siteSpecific` in `about:config`, in Firefox it defaults to true.

Firefox, LibreWolf and Zen, all have this value set to true by default. This behavior is only present in LibreWolf.

You can use the Stylus extension to get HN to look any way you want. There are some good community made styles for HN as well.

I appreciate your suggestion. But I hope not to have to exercise it. My go-to setup is: uBlock Origin, NoScript, Dark Reader.

Take me back to when user stylesheets were a normal browser feature and not a special extension

There's an article about insecurities in Firefox (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like Ungoogled Chromium.

Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.

Browser engines have become so complex that each ultimately represents a massive attack surface. I think, rather than trying to pick the most secure browser (which may change over time) instead:

* Stick to one browser engine per device as much as possible. Two at the most.

* Isolate installed browser engines as much as possible (i.e. Qubes or mobile operating system levels of sandboxed or virtualized isolation, not just containers or flatpaks for dev-environment tidiness and separation).

* Connect end-user devices with browser engines installed to the Internet only while actively using the Internet.

Would be great if the article would be updated from time to time. It is a good read but some of the presented problems are already fixed.

I'm generally happy with the "original" Firefox. Just wished it played better with KDE Plasma, especially on Wayland. It ignores the window decoration settings among other things.

Go to Customize Toolbar, check "Title Bar" at the bottom - that gives a Plasma-native title bar with window controls.

Sure but then you lose the screen estate. I guess you can't have it all.

Not released yet, but honorable mention to ladybird: https://ladybird.org/

Unrelated to Firefox though.

I am a bit confused by their moving from C++ to Swift instead of Rust. It sounds a bit Apple-first. I get that it ports to Linux okay, but will it be hard to make it work with Windows some day?

The main reasons were that Swift supports OOP and Rust doesn't (useful because web standards are object-oriented and it's easier to follow the specs when you can model them in your code), and that Swift supports C++ interoperability instead of just C interoperability like Rust (makes it easier to incrementally move to Swift in an existing C++ codebase).

Rust makes more sense if you were to start from scratch, but the Ladybird devs said that their code is already heavily OOP, so it maps to Swift a lot better.

Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish they'd make an actual browser around it too).

Yeah I guess it's the same story as with the TSC port to Go

If we can't even trust Firefox anymore, how can we trust these other browsers?

Fireforks

Fireworks: Emphasis on colour, animation, bells, whistles and bangs.

Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.

Firefux: Porn optimised browser.

endless possibilities.....

I switched to GNU IceCat about a week ago, following the ToS / privacy changes in FF. I have never used chrome, and never will on principle, in fact I now use zero google services, or best I can. Disabling webfonts / google fonts has been interesting. Anyway, IceCat is growing on me, once I figured out how to gradually enable bits of js for the sites I frequent (not many left at this point). I have a physical aversion to adverts, so I feel better that my limited browsing data is not being sold by mozilla. One thing I havent yet worked out is enabling webGL in IceCat, since I want to get back into my Zig/wasm/WebGL stuff soon.

I'm interested if HN has stats for visitor browser-agent, but also for account-holders. Since I wonder how many users actually switched in the last month, or if it was all just huff and puff.

Huff and puff i hope, considering it was a case of Firefox being nit-picked to death again by the privacy crowd that get a Chrome alternative for free.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

I understand that a donation on the Mozilla Foundation is not a way to fund Firefox development, but i believe that the services that get sold through Firefox like Mozilla VPN do fund development. Maybe you could sign up for one (you don't have to use it) to ensure IceCat continues to exist?

Full disclosure, I have a 1 year sub to Mozilla VPN, I even used it once or twice.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, not a fork but a suite of configs and mods for Firefox.

https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix

This looks cool, am I missing the Windows client, or is it only available on *nix systems?

To install on Windows you have to manually install the configs on top of an existing Firefox install. Instructions are on the website.

Interesting discussion! It's true that many Firefox forks focus on UX and privacy, but as some have pointed out, they still rely on Mozilla for core web standard updates. It would be cool to see a fork that really pushes the boundaries of web tech, maybe incorporating some Rust-based engine components for better performance and security. Has anyone experimented with Servo in a fork? Also, the mention of the Tor browser is spot on - it's a privacy powerhouse, but perhaps not for everyday browsing. I wonder if a fork could combine the best of both worlds?

I believe that would be mullvad. Tor browser without the tor.

IMO no real need for anything but Firefox Beta and Nightly now. A bit faster, faster features. Finally, native vertical tabs. Fully functioning Ublock origin. Browsing life is good.

I like the idea of using a Firefox fork, but one thing in particular keeps me tied to Firefox - my Firefox account and the sync feature.

I make heavy use of bookmarks and switch between devices frequently. Manually keeping those synced would be a bit of a nightmare.

Assuming that Firefox forks can use Firefox extensions, I imagine I could get around this problem by using some kind of bookmark extension. I don't know what options are available for that, though.

Zen supports FF sync out of the box. Just started trying it out, and it synced at least all the extensions without issue https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-acro...

I’m using Sync on LibreWolf just fine. I am interested in self hosting sync, but not there yet. I think it would be cool if someone could set up a sync server and charge a small fee for accounts. It’s all OSS and setting it up doesn’t look impossible. Just tedious.

I use two forks on a daily basis - Floorp and Waterfox. Both sync FF accounts just fine.

There's an extension called floccus [1] that can sync bookmarks between numerous different browsers (including both Firefox/Gecko and Chromium/Blink based browsers, mobile and desktop) and plug into a user-controlled NextCloud [2] or Linkwarden [3] instance running on a local homelab server for backups.

However, I try to minimize the number of installed extensions to reduce my own browser fingerprint. As others have replied, Firefox Sync works across most of today's popular downstream shadow-forks of Firefox (as in, forks that shadow the Firefox releases rather than truly forking the code). If you don't want to give Mozilla's enshittified corpse your email (I don't), just use an email service that supports aliases to sign up for Firefox Sync... Which is in any case a good idea generally: no two of your important online accounts should point to the same email, even if behind the scenes the aliases are all routing emails back to you.

[1]: https://floccus.org/

[2]: https://nextcloud.com/

[3]: https://linkwarden.app/

Seamonkey needs more love. The best one for me, does not try to be "modern" - keeps the interface unchanged and only updates real functionality.

I used LibreWolf for a long time, and Waterfox before that. Had to leave LibreWolf though because the audio quality was so awful (videos etc).

huh, I haven't noticed this, although I wasn't actually listening for poor audio quality. What is your OS?

Windows 10. I didn't notice it until I had to switch mid-way through a YouTube video to Chrome, and suddenly the audio was significantly louder and clearer. Shocked me.

It's also missing Fennec, the most well-known Android browser fork. I'm using it for years

Is there any fork which disables firefox's auto upgrade? I am not able disable it on Firefox or zen browser.

You can do this with vanilla Firefox using policies.json[1]. Check out `DisableAppUpdate` attribute.

If you're using Firefox from nixpkgs this is already disabled by default[2].

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/appli...

I've been using Zen since it's first public release and I must say, the development peace is simply incredible!

It's rough around the edges sometimes, but the quality of life features are chef's kiss:

<Ctrl + Shift + C> to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).

How does one "copy a webpage"? Do you mean taking a screenshot or the equivalent of Ctrl+AC?

No, just copy url

Same number of keys in any other browser: Ctrl+LC

Focusing on the number of “keys” is an attempt to deceive.

Yes, moving focus to the location bar and then copying the URL gives you the same result. It’s not the same number of steps as copying the URL without changing focus.

Ctrl-L, then while still holding Ctrl, hitting C is not the same number of steps as chording Ctrl-Shift and hitting C. Two steps vs one step.

This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries. How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.

Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are doing, except via donations.

Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.

If you take enough users from Firefox, who will do the expensive, hard work of updating and maintaining a browser engine?

If you take so much users from Firefox but they are paid users then you basically have the money to do the expensive hard work.

It costs over $200M per year. That's a lot of paying users.

"Mozilla spends $200M on it per year" does not mean it costs $200M per year. Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else, it's not a stretch to think they might be overspending on this too.

> Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else

That something is repeated endlessly does not make it true. In fact, it's a signal of disinformation (which doesn't make it false). And when words are used like "everything", it suggests 'nothing' specific is really known. And even to the degree it's true, the inference is weak; the question is, how much does web browser development cost?

$200M seems reasonable to me. Comparisons I've seen make it quite a bit less than estimates of Google's costs, for example.

That bridge will be crossed when we get to it. Thunderbird improved substantially after Mozilla stopped maintaining it. Thunderbird was held back by Mozilla.

Thunderbird began improving, as far as I know, after multiple post-Mozilla iterations, including returning to the Mozilla fold in a different relationship, which is where it is now. Its improvement was not correlated with the Mozilla breakup.

Mozilla and the Thunderbird teams knew, however, that a breakup was needed for both Thunderbird and for Firefox (Thunderbird compatibility requirements were holding back Firefox).

The reason was that Thunderbird was a low priority for an organization that has a much more successful application in Firefox. Low priority projects don't do well; the organization naturally structures, invests in equipment, hires, manages, etc. for the high priority. You want to be a high priority wherever you are - better to be the big app in a small org than a small app in a big org (as a very general statement).

If you don't know these things, why make up sh-t about Mozilla? What do you get out of it?

Gnu IceCat for me with Privacy Badger and libreJS. I would pay 10$ every month for Gnu IceCat, the ONLY firefox fork with no telemetry.

the ONLY webkit based zero telemetry browser is Kagis Orion

> Gnu IceCat, the ONLY firefox fork with no telemetry.

Why would you think that? Plenty of other forks like LibreWolf and IronFox have removed all telemetry.

You are right. I misread somewhere and declared without really checking. Not the first time either. My apologies.

Not a single fork with the basic convenience of changing keybinds?

Zen has quite a nice array of keybinds available in their basic settings menu. Just had a conflict of ctrl+shift+l opening some dev tools window instead of BitWarden, and the browser hotkey was easy to change. Speaking of keyboards, Tridactyl (https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-acro...) works out of the box in Zen as well

Better than the default, but not a nice one - the basics of tab navigation (previous/next) are missing, and you can't assign multiple shortcuts to a command.

And extensions don't cover it since they fail outside of a webpage context, so if you have a key to change tabs, you can't just (reliably) use it - it will break your changing sequence once you switch to a protected Settings tab

> Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late

Just wait until they discover that the web doesn't allow arbitrary browsers anymore, due to a certain "security" company doing deep inspection and blocking anything that isn't Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Only a matter of time. Remote attestation is one of the most subversive technologies ever invented and they have already tried to make it a web standard, it's only a matter of time before they try again and succeed.

We have all this free and open source software and it doesn't matter because they'll refuse us service if we use it. Only corporation owned computers will pass attestation. If you own your machine you will be turned away from every web site.

I'm rockin the LibreWolf on my laptop and gosh darnit I kinda like it.

Also Waterfox on the surveillance phone. Seems AOK so far.

I held off for a long time and tried to find multiple ways to "make Firefox work" and eventually just gave up on that. There are multiple ways to preserve the rights of web users and Mozilla isn't doing a great job there, so stop trying to save something that isn't working and redirect those efforts into something that will.

Are the rhel RPM distributions of Firefox considered forks at all?

They are maintained for a very long time.

Probably not. However, I do believe Fedora and Debian configure and patch out the most egregious Mozilla-isms that infect Firefox already.

IIRC Red Hat now just ships the Firefox ESRs and does not support a single version for the entire life of a RHEL release. You probably wouldn’t want a 10-year old browser anyway. And, in RHEL 10, they have stopped packaging Firefox in favor of a Flatpak.

Tangential, but what are folks' opinions on Vivaldi?

Stock Firefox + Siebery extension is all I need.

Even though Mozilla tracks you and sells your tracking data?

I do toggle off all the telemetry settings I can find. But you're talking as if there's a browser company that doesn't do that, or at least less than Mozilla, so can you suggest any of those?

What browser do you use?

You can turn off all Firefox telemetry in the settings.

Zen seems interesting but their website crashes when I try and visit which is a bit of deal breaker when it comes to a web browser

Honestly I just wish mozilla can get their act together, fragmentation is usually a bad idea...

It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.

I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt it's much. Many are audible about it, though.

Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers

I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on Linux soon.

> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...

No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.

I don’t mind crash reporting.

I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.

There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.

Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.

I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.

In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.

I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf. It even seems to be faster.

the point is not that firefox is "not doing much worse than chromium browsers". the point is that they were founded upon principles of not doing that

> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...

That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the issues right now is that there are people who have intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact, it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which was never an intent those power users had in mind: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-s...

I also switched from Firefox to LibreWolf, both on Linux and on macOS. I'll likely use the latest Chrome just for banking and other high security tasks, but for my normal browsing LibreWolf seems to work fine.

I switched after years of annoyances with mozilla.

You can’t get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.

Waterfox is not months behind? We follow ESR releases fairly promptly.

Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the social destinations on the web.

Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source volunteer driven projects to keep up.

I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.

And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.

Netscape / Firefox once broke the browser market.

We need a hero.

Modern bad guys kill heroes in the womb.

We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared to do without the wonderful services and contents that are "offered" by big corps "for free".

[dead]

Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?

Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds.

Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).

At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.

Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.

How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an entire browser engine?

Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.

The problem is that the difficult not only increases with time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop and maintain a new engine.

Have you ever met a team that maintained a fork of a legacy codebase with more than 6 figures of code?

Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.

Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.

Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..

I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.

> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.

Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.

That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.

Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.

What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for years and years?

Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.

Exactly, the situation with Chrome is the exact same sort of benevolent dictator problem we had with Internet Explorer, except this time dressed up with an open source license.

Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.

Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages (among other things).

Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.

If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.

Couldn't this be said about the Linux kernel?

I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions.

Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.

Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.

China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.

Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?

They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.

I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.

> They wanted a browser they have full control over

Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and market dominance to further their business goals with their attempts to kill Manifest V2

Firefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008

Whoops, you are right, I misread one source.

You can read the comic that explains some of the reasoning here: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html

IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.

They didn't build it from the ground up but used WebKit.

Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape.

Imagine a world where the state of the web ecosystem's faith is down to just Google and Apple.

> Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape.

My memory is definitely fuzzy, but I remember Netscape Navigator 4 wasting years on a scratch rewrite, and Internet Explorer becoming complacent.

Why would it be a problem for an open source browser engine to become dominant? At what point should we be worried if Linux becomes too popular?

Linux users should just switch to Windows too.

Windows isn't FOSS. Chromium is.

Why would they do that?

Exactly my point! They wouldn’t, and shouldn’t.

They left off the sarcasm tag.

Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.

Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.

Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.

To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.

Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.

Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/

And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.

Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.

> Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome

Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?

They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.

If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.

I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.

I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.

They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.

I don't think we should guess.

In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.

And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines.

If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?

Thanks for those insights. So they might have good reasons to support Google‘s position.

> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.

It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.

IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.

I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.

My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.

It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.

IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.

Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.

> Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together.

Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.

That said,

> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.

Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.

Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.

Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others.

Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.

> for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome

This is not true

Lol they just hide it very well - go to chrome://apps and check what's there :)

Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to Windows' desktop?

Azure vs GCP

Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps)

Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks

Bing vs Google Search

...?