But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.
That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.
I'm skeptical; You're probably measuring Chromium + ads against FF + ads.
The only fair test is testing agains FF + uBlockOrigin. And there, FF wins hands down.
> Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something.
This is rare in my experience. And most were fixed with an extension to change the user agent string. Or were for amusement and used a new Chrome feature. Or used a feature Mozilla rejected for security and there were alternatives.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/workspaces?for...
It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
This is a non-issue, if the devtools is opened, checkbox for "disable cache" is is checked by default.
> When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
How can you be developing front-ends and not have the devtools open while doing your quick edit-test cycle?
And I don't think your first point is quantified correctly and I am sure there is no data to back it up. But I understand the appeal of trying to quantify your personal experience.
Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.
I do have to keep Chrome around on desktop due to VirusTotal + reCaptcha setup to be purposely onerous for non-Chrome users. I'll get caught in loops trying to scan files after only scanning a few where I'll get like 5 absurdly vague captchas in a row. You must solve all of them in a row or it starts over from the beginning. It does this even if I'm logged into Google, logged into VirusTotal, and have uBlock Origin disabled on VirusTotal.com. It appears to be by design. So, to ensure I get to scan all my PortableApps.com releases, I have to use Chrome.
Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...
As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.
Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.
Self-fulfilling cycle.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
yeah I love Firefox - but it takes a lot of memory + drains battery faster
Orion (https://orionbrowser.com) is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, Linux, iPadOS and iOS that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions natively ⟩ including uBlock Origin.
We have no plans to drop extension support. Content blocking is a feature, not a loophole, and we think users should have full control over what runs in their browser.
You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:
* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation
* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.
* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.
I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.
This issue persists on other browsers with ad blocking extensions? Including on iOS with FF Focus enabled. Is there a browser+extension combination that does not have this issue
Some context that might explain (though not excuse) the situation: unlike browsers built on Chromium or Firefox/Gecko, Orion was built from scratch on top of WebKit. No fork, no upstream codebase to pull from. That means every feature, every integration, every compatibility shim is ours to build and maintain. Browsers that fork Chromium or Gecko inherit years of battle-tested extension support, rendering fixes, and platform work for free — we don’t.
On top of that, the macOS team is 3 people. About 70% of our engineering time goes to maintenance and keeping up with WebKit/OS updates, ~20% to third-party app compatibility (extensions like 1Password, ad blocking lists, etc.), and what’s left — maybe 10% — goes to community support, discussions, and new features combined. That’s why our changelogs look active but long-standing issues persist: we’re constantly triaging a backlog with thousands of entries and making painful priority calls every single day.
None of this is meant as an excuse. You’re right that stability matters, and the issues you describe are real. But this is the cost of building a genuine alternative to the browser market rather than shipping another Chromium or Gecko wrapper. We think that trade-off is worth it for users who want real engine diversity and full extension support without Google’s or Mozilla’s constraints.
That said, we can’t do it alone — that’s exactly why Orion+ exists. If you believe in what we’re building, subscribing is the most direct way to help us grow the team and get to that “Snow Leopard” moment faster.
We’re sorry for the rough edges. We know they’re there, and we’re working on it.
I loved Orion and have been using as a daily driver almost since day 1 including paying for it but now it’s completely unusable. I’ve since moved to Firefox.
The fact that a pinned thread was silent for months concerns me about the future of Orion. It honestly hurts to see.
Kagi has a good rep; misleading comments like this hurts it.
Here you go, official beta flatpak:
The original Unix philosophy (McIlroy, Ritchie, Thompson) says nothing about source code licensing. It’s about programs that do one thing well and work together through universal interfaces.
Open source is a distribution and licensing model; conflating it with software openness misrepresents those core tenets. Orion supports Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions, and standard web APIs — that’s interoperability in practice.
That being said, the future is not written ;)
This has been reported for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203237
Could you please clarify?
By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.
Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode
No problem directly downloading from the source (arguably better cuz I can keep the installer) but is there a reason Apple isnt allowing Orion on the AppStore or was that a choice on Kagi's part?
I can't find it in the downloads.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
If money gets short, the first thing they would cut would be a browser.
I am absolutely knocking Mozilla for taking Google money.
It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.
My fear is that, let's say Mozilla falls or shrinks considerably. It would take only a few complex but rationalised technologies from Google via chrome for Firefox and it's derivatives to fall behind. It already feels like they are constantly chasing instead of innovating and it wouldn't take much for them to fall behind on even that.
Personally, when they killed of the Servo team, that was a sign of their future. It was the team that was prototyping new web technologies long before they were mainstream ready. A lot of their stuff had been deployed into the main releases to great effect. The huge performance jump when they switched to the Quantum rendering system on version 68+ was a lot of their work. Then a few years back Mozilla just killed it off. It basically said they don't want to consider future technologies they are happy following. I don't see Firefox going away anytime soon but I'm not sure what shape it will be in a decade.
God help us.
Maybe after few another "we are switching from language X to language Y" blogposts.
Mozilla literally advocates for an "online advertising ecosystem"
At present Firefox is designed to send search traffic to Google by default
Mozilla can only see its continued existence through support from advertising. It does not just partner with advertising compaines, it actually acquired an adtech company
Google has a history of "shaking the cushions" by targeting their advertising customers and Chrome. It's reasonable to forsee that they could also target the agreement with Mozilla, i.e., Firefox
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-found-a-sneaky-way-t...
https://nypost.com/2023/11/29/business/google-ad-chief-jerry...
Maybe Mozilla breaks its partnership with Google, who knows. But based on a long history of Mozilla advocacy for online ads and working with online advertising companies, it seems 100% committed to online advertising as a "business model" regardless of whether it partners with Google or another "search engine"
Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.
The ad folks don't work around ubo lite now, because they understand it drives people to ubo actual.
Once that option is not really reasonable for anybody not highly technical... That's when the fun begins.
Makes switching easy.
I'm tired of all the (mostly technical) people whining that they need Chrome, and only Chrome can browse the internet. Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work and conveniently "it was some time back and I don't remember the details".
I've been using FF since before it was called Firefox. In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox - online shopping, social media, banking, custom line-of-business internal apps, ERP apps... you name it.
And, TBH, if I did, I'd just visit that one site with Chrome, and still use FF daily.
I have. The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox. I normally end up using Safari for that particular site.
Additionally, lots of stuff doesn't work when Advanced Tracking Protection is on, enough that if I have any issues my first step is disabling that.
I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)
These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.
And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.
- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.
- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google
That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.
You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?
Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.
You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.
Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)
> https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
> 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil
implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?
Neat! I rate this sentence at 7/10 on my scale of shit American companies say. The top score is currently held by Palantir with their X bio "Software that dominates."
You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....
Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.
There's no such thing in the Google realm
Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
That said, selector based ad-blocking is still supported in MV3. So might be possible to get most of the functionality with both a MITM-level blocker and an MV3 selector based blocker.
Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...
Poor little Google doesn't have the resources to support mv2.
I bet they ain’t found shit, or even looked. There was a time I would read that charitably because it was Google, but that time has long passed. That reads like a lie to justify their actions.
In what way? I've never noticed a difference.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
One time setup, it’s synced to Mozilla account for later reinstalls
This meant they added to Blink all the Gecko features uBlock Origin used?[1] Or they said they could maintain MV2 after Google removed it fully? Or they supported it so far?
They said We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible. But other developers said this and meant they would support MV2 until Google removed it.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
Cmon, it's in the article.
That change came after Google's changes around MV3 were released. I actively campaign against using Google anything at my job as well.
People just like to rage against Google.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
It's even available on iOS, I have it running in Safari
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
So much for blocking at network level.
Here is the guy who builds the browser I use https://www.stoutner.com/about/
git https://gitweb.stoutner.com/?p=PrivacyBrowserAndroid.git;a=s...
download https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-android/changelog/
And then there's still Firefox and all of its forks.
Best of luck to Big Tech as people will move on elsewhere.
Anyone tried that?
(Cheeky phrasing, of course this is an anecdote. But for anyone the news is relevant to, definitely recommend a try!)
Any other browser with uBlock Origin: Chrome is dead.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
Unfortunately sometimes my Intel Arc B580 has a driver quirk where all the windows freeze and unlike Chromium based browsers I can't open Task Manager and kill the GPU Process and have it restart and have everything keep working, but rather have to kill the whole browser and restart it and hope the tabs load back correctly - thankfully haven't had many issues with losing those (only once or twice in the past year, but those were fucking annoying).
Either way, I explored both Edge as my daily driver for a year or so and also Safari on my Mac - both are actually fine as far as the user experience is concerned, but in the end I still come back to Firefox. It's a browser, it doesn't feel user hostile, it does its job well enough. Also personally I like its devtools more.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
This change is good for the majority of users, but is actually bad for large enterprise customers and highly-regulated customers. It puts more control and onus of responsibility on to Google, rather than the end-user. So, we will expect to see better enforcement of controls from Google for the lowest-hanging-fruit that some aspects of MV2 exposed.
What's that, you say? MV2 changes? Well there's 3 things.
1. Remote code execution. The ability for someone to just yeet commands into your browser. A little harder to do directly.. Still very possible, just with extra steps.
2. Removing the ability for extensions to access network requests directly, which is what adblockers often relied on. It also means malicious extensions could snoop on your requests. They still can, just with extra steps.
3. Background persistence, an extension could stay alive, maintain state, run timers, keep connections open, and coordinate across tabs. So this shuts off the "background persistence" piece -- but helps with ensuring better isolation. Still possible, but now requires yeeting your data to an external provider instead of keeping the state contained locally.
Those 3 changes are incredibly powerful, and will impact many, many Enterprise security tools. Tools that now instead will result in products like "Island Browser", and "Enterprise Chrome" being rolled out to supplement the functionality that MV2 gave us.
This change goes against the US and Australian government's hardening advice, and reduces the overall efficacy of security controls we're able to implement within our web browsers natively.
CISA's own guidance on this is pretty straightforward (aptly named Securing Web Browsers and Defending Against Malvertising for Federal Agencies): https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/CISA%20CEG%...
Here's the Australian Government's control relating to it:
> Control: ISM-1485; Revision: 1; Updated: Sep-21; Applicable: NC, OS, P, S, TS; Essential 8: ML1, ML2, ML3 > Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
And if you're wondering about what incentives there are that led to this change, you can read this letter written to the Chairman of the FTC by a US Senator back in 2020. This letter is linked to from the same CISA document I shared earlier.
You should read it in full, and consider what incentives the Senator was referring to -- and how they also apply in this scenario.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/011420%20Wyden%20...
Those Enterprise Chrome products I mentioned earlier? Chrome's change has now put some of this functionality which was previously possible with an extension, behind the Enterprise Chrome Premium SKU: https://chromeenterprise.google/products/chrome-enterprise-p...
smiling smugly from planet firefox
