- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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The problem with Web Standards is that they’re so complete, broad and complex that it’s very hard as an independent team to get started writing a browser.
You’d have so little daily active users compared to the titans products (Chromium, Gecko, WebKit) that even if you made something super good, it would still be hard to guarantee website compatibility without faking the user-agents.
There’s also a lot of complexity involved in writing a sandbox for every instance of a website (tabs or iframe) and sharing information between multiple process. I don’t know how they do it in Chrome, but in Firefox they have a whole specification language for that which compiles to C++.
You also have to recreate the DevTools and other tooling for developers to adopt your browser and for you to debug any issues with your DOM renderer…
I love how much the web has to offer nowadays with technologies like WebRTC, WebSocket, Blobs, GamePad API, modern CSS3 but it has also the effect of locking us down into a tiny ecosystem.
I really their should be legislation on what companies can do with their browser because they’ve become such an important piece of the internet so they should serve public good.
I don’t know how to make it happen and I don’t even know if it’s a good idea when you consider the governance issues it would bring for open-source project.
I’m really passionate about this technology !
Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.
Apple’s browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you’re on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as “Chrome” or “Firefox” are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can’t use Safari.
Google is an ad company, so they don’t want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it’s a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.
Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there’s a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:
“investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.
It looks like it’s only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they’re obsessed with stupid projects like AI.
Apple has a conflict of interest too: they need to keep safari gimped so that users have to install apps instead of using PWAs, so that Apple can keep getting 30% of the app sales.
As a result, Safari is terrible and very far behind in standards. It’s the new internet explorer.
It looks like it’s only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads[.]
I don’t know if I’d take it that far. Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined. Now, will it be possible to write and distribute a popular an effective adblocker under these conditions? It appears to be getting harder.
Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined.
Technically, sure. But, these are extremely complex software products, and it would be one hobbyist vs. an entire software division of a trillion dollar company who are determined to make sure you see ads.
I switched to Firefox the morning they disabled uBlock Origin.
I never left Firefox. It’s a fantastic browser.
Meanwhile ublock origin works fine in Fennec/Firefox Android.
If you’re still using Chrome, do yourself a favour and install Firefox.
Main reason I don’t is cuz:
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn’t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn’t happening for their Android browser yet.
This only applies to android, not desktop use, and you couldn’t use uBlock on mobile chrome anyway so it is simply not relevant.
Other security implications are stilp valid.
They’re completely irrelevant to the average person.
If you want absolute perfection then sure, stick with Chrome but implying Firefox on GrapheneOS is insecure is misinformation.
I use Firefox as my main browser on Android, and all apps that invoke a WebView do so using Firefox’s rendering engine, with uBlock Origin and Dark Reader working seamlessly. So, maybe this info about Firefox for Android lacking WebView support is outdated?
Exemple after clicking a link on Twitter/X:
Chrome? A browser that’s easily replaceable with any other browser? Huh… Didn’t see that one coming.
/S
I’m saying this as a 2 year convert Firefox user: mostly easily replaceable. Sure, I can browse pretty much every page that I can on chrome. However, a few sites don’t work the same way - sometimes because of the site’s conscious decision, sometimes because of Firefox.
Take Facebook, for example. On desktop, I can’t make voice calls anymore from the desktop site. For a while it was possible with non encrypted chats, but now pretty much all of them are encrypted, and FF is not compatible with that. I also can’t watch h265 videos in my chats anymore. I’m still sticking with FF, but I just can’t easily say that FF is just as good for everything (I’m still not going back to chrome).
Yeah I’m a 20-some year FF user and when it started you had to have IE as a backup because not everything was compatible. In the late 2000s through late 2010s everything worked everywhere, then with chromes dominance places have stopped testing or supporting certain things in FF and it feels like history is repeating itself. Unfortunately you need a chromium-based backup realistically for certain sites, but 99.5% of things work totally fine in FF.
A lot of websites are broken on Firefox which is a shame. I can’t even scroll down on some news sites. What a shame…
This might be the fault of your ublock filters rather than Firefox. Do you have a cookie banner filter list? Some websites are blocking scrolling until you make a cookie decision. A short disable of ublock, rejecting the cookies should then work. The “downside” of a powerful ad blocker
Agreed, I’ve never come across a site that was broken because of Firefox. Usually the culprit is adblock being too good at blocking, so just toggle it off and refresh and page loads just fine.
LibreWolf if you want security, privacy and freedom
Fennec on Android
Vivaldi on Linux and Windows is still good in my experience, and so far uBlock Origin for manifest v2 still works. I hope they keep v2 support forever, forking completely if they must.
Firefox-based https://zen-browser.app/ if you want to get fancy
This looks really interesting, but I have so many questions. A few important ones that come to mind immediately:
- What is the user agent that’s reported? I’m guessing Firefox, but if there are any indicators that would give it away it’s not Vanilla Firefox or a popular fork, this could make you more unique.
- Are the mods publicly identifiable? Another thing that might make you very unique and prone to fingerprinting.
A core part of being private online is blending in with traffic, so using a niche browser like Zen (depending on the configuration) would make you stand out.
The product looks good, and the privacy policy is pretty good too. Still, it’d be good to understand all the aspects of how Zen prevents you from standing out in the crowd.
I don’t know if you or someone else can speak to this. I would jump into their community, but it’s on Discord, so that’s absolutely not happening.
Thanks for this!! I became spoiled with Arc’s UI, but it’s a Chrome based browser. This looks like it’s the same experience without the bs.
Yeah. Zen is a bit newer and I’d say not quite as slick an experience yet, but it has come a long way in the last couple months and is getting very good
I’ve liked this one lately.
The Lemmy hivemind Firefox bias is a little bit insane lol
It’s a good thing I stayed loyal to Firefox. Mainly due to my dislike of change lol, but I was forced to use Chrome and it felt ominous with its owner being Google.
I still find it interesting that the Vanadium browser in Grapheneos is Chromium based, with no possibility of extensions. I know this is for security reasons but it feels odd to still use chrome on my phone and Firefox everywhere else.
I just use a Firefox derivative there as well, because of Ublock. Tried Vanadium but the adblocking was just not good.
Which one are you using? I was looking at ironfox
Fennec right now, switched before Ironfox was out and now switching would be painful as there is no export, so all manual…
i like waterfox https://www.waterfox.net/
Whats the advantage of Waterfox over librewolf?
eh? no idea, never used it. these downvotes are wild to me. is waterfox bad somehow?
I don’t know either. This one of those cases I wish people would elaborate, since I don’t know much about waterfox so would welcome more insight into it.
in the early days, waterfox was simply a fork of firefox that provided 64bit support when the official builds didn’t. since then i’ve kept using it since it seems like firefox with better default settings for me. between 2019 and 2023 waterfox was owned by an advertising agency although they exerted no control over the software as far as i can tell, and everything remained open source. maybe some peoples info is outdated and they don’t know that the partnership ended 2 years ago. sorry for bad formatting i’m on mobile.
I have no idea. I did not downvote lol. Was genuinely trying to figure out if there was a reason to switch.
I would assume there is no issue until someone actually explains what the problem is.
wonder if they’re somewhere else in the thread naming other browsers. i looked up librewolf and it looks solid enough anyway.
Better defaults for the average user who isn’t looking for maximum privacy
fair enough makes sense. LibreWolf is real strict about it.
Removed by mod
Use an alternative chromium based browser?
What is everyone’s thoughts on duckduckgo browser? I’m on grapheme os and have always used Firefox on my desktop
Why not use Firefox for android too?
