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It’s too bad making a decent web browser is such a massive undertaking so there aren’t literally thousands of alternatives to choose from. :/
And they’re all chromium under the hood. The illusion of free choice.
As it stands today Mozilla is the only thing keeping google from being labeled a browser monopoly, but man can Mozilla let go of the footgun for once.
Mozilla and Safari.
Ah Safari, the IE8.5 of modern browsers…
The “best” argument I’ve heard recently for that heap of shit? The extensions have the best UI integration! Lol
People do so much bending over backwards to excuse every shitty thing apple does.
Safari is more energy efficient on macOS compared to other browsers.
But like it or not the (artificial) hold Safari has over the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem is the only thing stopping a complete Google hegemony over the web browser market.
Mozilla is circling the drain and the few nascent new browser projects are years away from technical maturity and may never establish any meaningful market share anyway.
Lol so I should appreciate that apple is preventing browser choice because they chose not to use chromium for the only option they provide?
Fuck Apple. This situation is on them. Preventing other browsers should have triggered governments to rip them apart for monopolistic practices. I cannot say “fuck apple” enough.
Mozilla is not “circling the drain”. Firefox is great, haters can hate all they want.
Yep definitely. I can open 100+ safari tabs but my shitty old laptop will crash if I have 20 on chrome or firefox or brave
Having more than 20 tabs open is a bad idea. And yeah it’s going to be a faster browser when you deeply tied it into the OS you also built. Doesn’t make it better in the least.
The nicest thing I can say about it is at least they killed Flash.
As a web dev, screw safari. Apple just randomly decides to not follow web standards some time so I spend tons of time debugging random safari issues that I CANT EVEN TEST MYSELF because I don’t pay for apple products
No, not Safari. While it’s technically true that Safari’s WebKit engine isn’t based on Chromium’s Blink engine, that’s only because the genetic relationship goes in the other direction: Blink was initially forked from WebKit (which was itself forked from KHTML, by the way).
Point is, Mozilla’s Gecko is the only major browser engine that’s fully unrelated to Blink.
What about the Ladybird project?
I feel like you’d be interested in Ladybird. It’s a fully independent web browser under development, it’s still in its very early stages but they seem serious about it.
We need a better funding model for open source.
Praying that people will donate enough to support your browser isn’t exactly great and really doesn’t work for most open-source projects.
Unless they are doing something new in that space, it’ll just he smooching up to big donors in back rooms.
At least Firefox is open about their deal with Google.
I’ve always said “give everyone a software voucher they can spend on whatever software developer and the government assigns grants based on vouchers”
The challenge for Ladybird and other independent browser projects is the enormous size and scope required of modern browsers, which is also still growing. Web browsers are now probably second only to operating systems in complexity in the personal computing space.
Plus even if they do reach technical maturity, they still have to convince people to use it. That’s not been going very well for Mozilla, and they already have a working browser.
We need the Swiss gov to step in and start developing their own browser lol
What’s a good alternative that isn’t chromium? I’m on Mozilla mobile
LibreWolf is a Firefox fork that is not affiliated with Mozilla.
Here’s the problem: there are three web browsers.
Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko - that’s it.
A “fork” that depends on the same browser engine and rendering engine is not really a fork, it is just a UI flavor. For the sake of security, privacy and data handling, this choice is as meaningful as changing your desktop environment on Linux.
If you access anything financial or personally identifying (taxes, banking, credit cards, medical services, driver’s license, an email that is linked to any of those accounts, etc) you should use the browser distributed by the engine’s primary developer (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). If you use something else, you are dependent on a downstream third-party developer to properly implement the engine and ensure that its data handling is properly integrated with the browser application and the OS, and you are dependent on their keeping the engine in their knockoff version up to date. You will always be behind the security patches of the main branch, even if the downstream developer is doing everything correctly. On the internet, this is an extreme risk.
Sure, sorry if fork wasn’t the right term, I was just saying LibreWolf is Firefox sans Mozilla. The LibreWolf team is very privacy focused.
Full disclosure I use Vivaldi - which is chrome - because I’m a filthy heathen.
Vivaldi is chrom_ium_. Been trying out the last month on macOS. Great browser, although it’s funny how for some settings you get taken to a different page that looks 100% like Chrome except with Vivaldi branding.
Vivaldi on iOS doesn’t feel as great though – less ‘native’. Certain gestures and animations just don’t quite fit.
Shoutout to Webkit-based Orion for both platforms. Slowly gravitating to that
i will peep Orion - thanks for the heads up.
Blasphemer!!
I was just saying LibreWolf is Firefox sans Mozilla
It’s not though, unless they’re building their own engine.
I mean by that logic Nextcloud is just a rebranded skin of Owncloud and Libre Office is just a rebranded skin of Open Office. I’m sure someone can chime in with a more damning real world example but the important distinction with a fork is not “do they entirely replace most of the codebase” but instead it’s “how well do they maintain the project” and “how much value do they add through improvements and features”
No, there are only two. Blink (Chromium’s engine) was forked from WebKit initially; they’re related.
Thanks
Sorry, I missed the mobile part of your statement
For mobile I would recommend duckduckgo private browser.
Which is chromium
Pretty sure it’s Webkit?
You’re wrong, but chromium uses a fork of webkit
welp, thats that. oh well. i can be wrong - all good.
it doesnt matter really because i cant develop a browser and i have to use what exists - i choose duckduckchrome.
It does matter, because Firefox exists, and you’re free to choose that one too. If you know about the underlying tech your decision is more informed.
At this point, Safari lmao
If you want to remove all choice from your phone, spend several hundred dollars for the privilege, and get a heaping pile of shit pretending to be a browser.
What would it actually take? Google did it. Apple did it with WebKit.
Do you have to be as big as google, apple, or microsoft to make a browser? Is a browser as labor intensive as a whole-ass operating system? Or does it have to do with proprietary/patented tech roadblocks?
Please remember that Webkit is based on KHTML, the browsing engine that Konqueror, the webbrowser in the KDE suite, used.
So Apple forked KHTML, made WebKit, Safari, Chrome and loads of other browsers used it and improved it, then Google forked WebKit, and made Blink, their current browsing engine
You could technically fork Blink but the question is whether you have the resources to keep up with web standards. The Web is effectively the universal UI toolkit these days and the pace of development reflects that.
Why fork? Aren’t all of the major engines open source? People can choose one and build a browser around it and leave out the cruft.
You’d need to fork if you decided that you don’t like the direction an engine is moving towards. Other than that there’s no real reason.
What’s hard to do is the engine, you can just take gecko or webkit and make your own browser. I doubt Mozilla’s AI ventures will affect gecko, probably just the browser itself.
This is such a braindead fucking take. Companies should explore new technology not just take a look at the current popular opinion and run with it as absolute fact. The majority of this post is literally just using AI as a boogieman, oh no they’re creating jobs that relate to AI! The company is over!!!
They saw three roles that mentioned AI and took that as absolute proof that Mozilla has “fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads”. Grow the fuck up. The internet takes money to run, ads are an inevitability so no shit a major browser company has someone managing that aspect of their browser…
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
I’m ok with them chasing ethical applications of AI. I’m more tired of their half-assed efforts to chase every shiny new object over the last few years. It feels like as a non-profit, they should be comparatively immune to chasing the same transitory trends that other shareholder-owned companies are obsessed over. But it seems like for Mozilla, they have an even shorter attention span than their corporate competitors. We’ve seen them chase after crypto, metaverse, augmented reality, Firefox OS, and now AI. All of those efforts fizzled out with a whimper.
That crypto one isn’t even a project, just that they used some service to handle crypto donations for them. It is weird though that they think they can just walk into a successful space without offering anything new and still expect to get users.
It’s a shame FirefoxOS didn’t gain enough traction.
Sure, but the only way to counter AI spam in the dead internet might be to have your own local AI model to filter junk out. And that has to be with the browser.
There is also cookie consent spam, ads and newspaper “notify me” shit that probably can only be fixed with AI.
Your take is that Mozilla doesn’t think before they adopt, except people here don’t think about what not to adopt either.
Thinking before they adopt is hard to do. I understand some experiments get cut. But I’m not sure they are thinking even after they adopt. Thus the half-assed delivery and constantly abandoning projects before they get a fair shake
That is the first time I’ve seen South Africa listed separately from Africa
The brain-dead take is that companies should explore new technology. Without any qualifiers on it (i assume there aren’t because you didn’t add any and you applied it to ai). That’s how we’ve ended up with such a huge amount of waste, pollution and theft from small independents.
Even if we just narrow it to the field of AI, the waste and environmental damage from just this kind of tech is just absurd.
Let’s add to the downsizing ai causes, the pathetic service disruptions and inevitable decline of a company’s reputation from using such a thing and its nothing but a waste.
Hate to say it but can not realy blame them. They need to make money somehow. And Google wont pay 80% of their bills forever.
Watch them still not making money in 10 years.
At the moment, I have a hard time to imagine them even surviving that long. But “Totgesagte leben länger”.
But this is not a Mozilla-exclusive problem. Open source in general has a massive funding problem.
I mean, I understand this argument, but Mozilla is still vastly superior to the alternatives. And as others have pointed out, even if Mozilla kicks the bucket, Firefox is open source and forks exist.
Mozilla has been making a lot of questionable decisions, but they are nowhere near the point-of-no-return yet. Mozilla is still a company, and companies make corporate decisions.
god this is depressing.
Mozilla has been a sinking ship for decades now.
There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
Everyone jumped to Chrome and Mozilla fucked around for literally years before they got the memo that actually browser performance matters. They were once the best browser tools on the market until once again Chrome pushed the envelope, and once again developers switched while Mozilla sat back and did nothing.
Mozilla meandered back and forth, releasing shitty products nobody wanted (like pocket and send) instead of focusing on the most important thing: the browser.
Yet they’re somehow still here, hobbling along, doing fuck knows what instead of making a better browser and innovating to beat Chrome.
Stopped innovating? Just because the user interface didn’t change much? They’ve contributed a ton to web api’s and the open web in general. They also contributed massively to rust, and private / secure browsing standards. It has absolutely not been left to languish. Now I prefer some other UI’s but you won’t catch me claiming Mozilla ceased innovation.
They’ve also contributed in general to JavaScript. So yeah, Google definitely pushed the envelope there, but Mozilla didn’t just watch it all happen. Also, factor in that they were key contributors to web assembly.
Yes they contributed a lot to web standards, bit they didn’t contribute to actual user experience which is why people install a web browser in the first place.
Mozilla consistently gets complacent.
That seems paradoxical to me. Maybe you mean user interface, but those standards are a massive part of experience. How media loads, caches, and renders. How cross site resources work. How DNS works. Etc. And just think of all their massive contributions to CSS and animations. I mean they play a pretty big part in user experience.
Not to mention MDN, for which many of us can be thankful alone.
I think what the commenter is saying is that’s great but where was that in their own browser at the time? Google was kicking ass moving browsers forward it’s great Mozilla contributed the scenes but why not take that and at least have made it work in their own browser.
I think the point is that the average web user doesn’t even know about things like caching, rendering, CSS, DNS, etc., let alone care. It’s awesome that Mozilla contributes to those things, but for 95% of the user base, unless it makes itself readily apparent in the browser itself, it might as well not exist to them.
Ok. Now pretend you’re me, a normal person who doesn’t even know what Rust is.
How has Firefox improved for me? The browser is clearly an inferior product.
The problem is that browsers aren’t profitable. Mozilla need a revenue source other than donations, and that’s why they’re trying to make another product that’ll stick. They need to make money somehow. If Google stops paying them because of the antitrust lawsuit, Mozilla will probably disappear in a few months.
Browsers are profitable, Mozilla only exists because of the money the browser brings in.
Yes, it’s true that the money is currently coming from Google but only because Google is willing to pay more than other search providers. If Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
To put it another way, Google isn’t forking out millions to Mozilla out of the goodness of its heart
EDIT: to everyone down voting this, please explain to me why Google also pays Apple an obscene amount of money to be the default search engine on iOS if there’s no competition in this space?
No.
Google pays to keep its monopoly on search.
Chrome, Android, etc. all are just tools to funnel views on their ads.
If Mozilla would fold, Google would have a monopoly on browsers, which could cause problems for them. So they finance fake competition.
No other company could pay even close to that amount of money.
Google pays to keep it’s monopoly on search
Agreed.
Google pays literally tens of billions to make sure they’re the default search engine across everything - including the likes of iOS.
Why is it that when Google pays Apple hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s because they’re enforcing their search monopoly, but when they pay Mozilla a fraction of that, it’s because Mozilla would have no way of staying afloat otherwise?
Why is Google paying apple so much if nobody else could afford it?
Make it make sense.
Because that way they avoid any competition.
Thing is, businesses like Google’s ads are not linear. If you can track 90% of people 90% of the time, your ads are much much more valuable to advertisers than a company that only tracks 70% of the people 90% of the time. So it makes sense to create a moat by literally shitting money on everyone around you.
Think about the opposite: if Apple would switch to DDG by default, most people would leave it at that. And that would mean, a significant chunk of the US search traffic is gone. Europe and the rest of the world are not that apple-heavy, but Apple users are rich power users (on average), these are extremely valuable.
I think you’re missing the point here. You’re claiming Google only pays Mozilla to have a competitor, yet they also pay apple even more money for the same thing in an area they’re just competing.
The point is that there is competition in the default browser search space, it’s just that Google pays more than anyone else.
If Google stopped paying Mozilla tomorrow, someone else would pay them for the same default search engine spot. It might not be as much, but it would still be a significant amount.
A few years ago it was Yahoo that footed the bill.
if Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
Have we all forgotten that time period when Yahoo! was the default search provider in Firefox?
Judging by the replies and down votes, yes we have.
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
That’s where the web started getting worse.
Yeah.
Everything gets made for IE and people scream like its the end of life on the planet, and still ridicule it to this day.
Everything gets made for Chrome and people cant stop slobbing knob over how glorious and great it is, and how good its been for everything, and blah blah blah.
Chrome is worse than IE ever was.
I never switched to Chrome and never really noticed any performance issues. If a page took half a second or a second to render, it was an absolute non issue to me.
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success, but there was also all the memes in 2010 about installing chrome to replace IE, and the ads that Google ran on their search page. I don’t think Pocket came out until Firefox was already deep into the decline. I do think Chrome held onto those users because of their ram efficiency at the time, and nice features like built-in translate. Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
Despite my above rant, I still use Firefox as my primary browser. The web works absolutely fine on it. I think I’ve encountered one site that required chrome to work correctly in the last year and that’s a huge improvement over where we were back in the early 2000’s with IE.
No, there’s other reasons why people don’t switch, compatibility is not the issue.
In the past i switched to Firefox for a few days, and the memory usage of google (gmail, calendar) was enough to make me switch back.
This time i did thunderbird too. The memory usage is still bad, but i was able to stay… for now.
I have to switch to chromium often, unfortunately. Various websites are untested with Firefox, and many apps such as Teams are not compatible with FF. Probably better than the early 2000’s but still really bad.
I use teams on Firefox and haven’t encountered any issues. Admittedly I only use it occasionally, as I do mainly use the desktop app.
I think they added some compatibility in the past year or so but I had issues detecting my microphone on Linux just 2 weeks ago. I’ve had some smaller ecommerce sites fail to load properly on Firefox/Librewolf, Red Hat’s Training website doesn’t work on Firefox, and also some features on apps like Google Meet and Miro are unavailable. It’s nothing that makes firefox unusable, and I can always open up ungoogled chromium when needed, but it is a serious issue for browser diversity and competition that the web has defaulted to chrome now.
At least it’s notable when a website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox rather than being a frequent annoyance
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success
I don’t think I fully believe that, normies don’t care about how fast a page loads and the proof of that is that they were using IE for so long.
Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
What? I’ve been using FF since 2006, or something like that, how is the web dependent on chrome?
It’s one factor among several. Another large factor is that Chrome was easier to deploy and manage in a corporate environment for many years. Really until Edge came out a whole lot of people had it foisted on them via their IT department at work, I’m sure many still do but Edge has definitely changed things and made that less common since it gets included with the OS. Combined with Google constantly pushing it everywhere these workers were guaranteed to encounter the option to download it at home even if they didn’t explicitly seek it out, and since they already used it at work it wasn’t a scary download it was familiar and made by that great company Google that everyone is so impressed by. They click the download and that’s that, they don’t even know Firefox is an option.
That’s for sure, my company doesn’t even allow FF
Decades? Slowest sinking ship in history.
The two slowest trends in tech: the fall of Mozilla and the rise of Linux
Mozilla was doomed from the start.
Netscape Inc. wanted to sell browsers eventually, which makes sense. It’s product which requires a massive amount of engineering effort. But, when Microsoft started tying IE to Windows and giving it away free, there was no way that Netscape could actually make any sales. The bigger reason their business was crushed was that Microsoft was also giving away their web server (IIS) away for free, while Netscape was charging for theirs.
Some kids today are too young to know that Microsoft was sued by the US government over this and lost the case (along with what was very likely Microsoft falsifying evidence). But, then Bush Jr. took office and the government basically took a case they had won and effectively threw out the win.
When it was clear that Netscape was going to fail as a business they open-sourced the browser either as an act of charity or spite. The problem is that it’s still a massive and expensive project to build a web browser. That’s especially true in a world where standards keep evolving and the browser has to keep having new features added.
Since making a browser was so expensive, they needed financial support, and eventually that came from Google. At first Google just wanted Firefox to exist as a hedge so that Microsoft wouldn’t dominate the browser market. But, once Google came out with Chrome it was both a way to keep directing traffic to Google search, and a way to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on browsers.
But, if 90% of the funding of your project comes from Google, there are some obvious lines you can’t cross. So, Mozilla has to keep doing this dance where they make a browser that competes with Chrome, but one that doesn’t cross certain lines that would make Google mad and result in them shutting off the funding.
Google would shut off the funding to Firefox in a heartbeat if they took ad blocking and privacy too seriously. But, Google doesn’t care too much if Mozilla messes around with AI or ads.
