HN doesn't want firefox to go away. HN wants firefox to be better, more privacy/security focused, and to stop trying to copy chrome out of the misguided hope that being a poor imitation will somehow make it more popular.
Sadly, mozilla is now an adtech company (https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...) and by default firefox now collects your data to sell to advertisers. We can expect less and less privacy for firefox users as Mozilla is now fully committed to trying to profit from the sale of firefox users personal data to advertisers.
As a 25 year Firefox user this is spot on. I held out for 5 years hoping they would figure something out, but all they did was release weird stuff like VPNs and half baked services with a layer of "privacy" nail polish.
Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.
They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.
You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.
Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.
What would be an acceptable revenue model? Google Chrome has the same privacy profile with the exception that Google retains the data for their own ad platforms.
Selling preferential search access is legally precarious due to FTC's lawsuit against Mozilla.
HN wants Firefox but with better stewardship and fewer misdirected funds.
Mozilla - wrongly - believes that the majority of FF users believe in Mozilla's hobby projects rather than that they care about their browser.
That's why - as far as I know - to this day it is impossible to directly fund Firefox. They'd rather take money from google than to be focusing on the one thing that matters.
HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be. The problem with producing the better product is the amount of in-fighting increases exponentially. Google produces a "fuck you got mine" type browser and everyone knows it, so nobody really cares when they make god awful privacy decisions or intentionally produce worst standards to try to fuck their customers up the ass in new and exciting ways.
When Firefox introduces a new feature, half the people complain it's stupid and worthless while the other half complain it's not enough. And, when it inevitably gets axed, it magically turns out actually it was beloved the whole time and oh no my Grandma used Pocket as life support and now she can't breath.
When Firefox implements new web standards half the people complain that they're bending to Google's whim and that these standards are stupid. We don't want them, just focus on performance and what people really care about! ... While the other half complains that it took so long, and in the meantime they switched to a real browser, like Chrome.
Of course, Safari is even further behind Firefox in standards and frankly it's not even close, but does anyone care? Of course not. Apple is another "fuck you got mine" type company. People love that.
And it doesn't just end at Firefox. Oh, no. Firefox OS? Depending on who you ask it's either the biggest missed opportunity ever or one of Mozilla's worst money burning schemes. It's Schrödinger's software - in a parallel universe where it took it off everyone would've always wanted it, and in the current universe nobody ever wanted it.
The biggest mistake Mozilla made was extending any kind of goodwill to their customer base. Clearly, that doesn't work and people do not like it. Let's all stop fucking around and be real for a second - nobody, and I do mean nobody, is switching to Google Chrome because Mozilla made some mistake. They're not, because the reality is that Firefox is truly irreplaceable and ahead of Chrome in so many aspects. They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.
I don't think that Mozilla believes that their pet projects are what the use community wants. I think they just don't care. Google's check will clear next year anyways.
We have no idea what is in that contract with Google. They get to be the default search engine, but what else? Does it prevent Firefox from accepting some sources of funding, like donations?
I am pretty sure that the issue is that they either admit to being so l stuck as a vassal beholden to Google, or they pretend to be enterprising and forward looking with many promising projects
I just want Firefox's search box to be on the top of the window so I don't have to bend my neck when I'm surfing in bed... I don't use it just for that.
It's unlikely, but it does actually happen. I've seen more than one complete rewrite of something important that had exactly the same bug. And I'm very sure that those sources were not related somehow.
That came to my mind as well. CSS was one of the earliest major applications of Rust in FireFox. I believe that work was when the "Fearless Concurrency" slogan was popularized.
Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.
If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.
The listed browsers are basically skins on top of the same chromium base.
It’s why Firefox and Safari as so important despite HN’a wish they’d go away.
HN doesn't want firefox to go away. HN wants firefox to be better, more privacy/security focused, and to stop trying to copy chrome out of the misguided hope that being a poor imitation will somehow make it more popular.
Sadly, mozilla is now an adtech company (https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...) and by default firefox now collects your data to sell to advertisers. We can expect less and less privacy for firefox users as Mozilla is now fully committed to trying to profit from the sale of firefox users personal data to advertisers.
As a 25 year Firefox user this is spot on. I held out for 5 years hoping they would figure something out, but all they did was release weird stuff like VPNs and half baked services with a layer of "privacy" nail polish.
Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.
They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.
You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.
Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.
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What would be an acceptable revenue model? Google Chrome has the same privacy profile with the exception that Google retains the data for their own ad platforms.
Selling preferential search access is legally precarious due to FTC's lawsuit against Mozilla.
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HN wants Firefox but with better stewardship and fewer misdirected funds.
Mozilla - wrongly - believes that the majority of FF users believe in Mozilla's hobby projects rather than that they care about their browser.
That's why - as far as I know - to this day it is impossible to directly fund Firefox. They'd rather take money from google than to be focusing on the one thing that matters.
HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be. The problem with producing the better product is the amount of in-fighting increases exponentially. Google produces a "fuck you got mine" type browser and everyone knows it, so nobody really cares when they make god awful privacy decisions or intentionally produce worst standards to try to fuck their customers up the ass in new and exciting ways.
When Firefox introduces a new feature, half the people complain it's stupid and worthless while the other half complain it's not enough. And, when it inevitably gets axed, it magically turns out actually it was beloved the whole time and oh no my Grandma used Pocket as life support and now she can't breath.
When Firefox implements new web standards half the people complain that they're bending to Google's whim and that these standards are stupid. We don't want them, just focus on performance and what people really care about! ... While the other half complains that it took so long, and in the meantime they switched to a real browser, like Chrome.
Of course, Safari is even further behind Firefox in standards and frankly it's not even close, but does anyone care? Of course not. Apple is another "fuck you got mine" type company. People love that.
And it doesn't just end at Firefox. Oh, no. Firefox OS? Depending on who you ask it's either the biggest missed opportunity ever or one of Mozilla's worst money burning schemes. It's Schrödinger's software - in a parallel universe where it took it off everyone would've always wanted it, and in the current universe nobody ever wanted it.
The biggest mistake Mozilla made was extending any kind of goodwill to their customer base. Clearly, that doesn't work and people do not like it. Let's all stop fucking around and be real for a second - nobody, and I do mean nobody, is switching to Google Chrome because Mozilla made some mistake. They're not, because the reality is that Firefox is truly irreplaceable and ahead of Chrome in so many aspects. They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.
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I don't think that Mozilla believes that their pet projects are what the use community wants. I think they just don't care. Google's check will clear next year anyways.
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We have no idea what is in that contract with Google. They get to be the default search engine, but what else? Does it prevent Firefox from accepting some sources of funding, like donations?
It would be great to get transparency on this…
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I am pretty sure that the issue is that they either admit to being so l stuck as a vassal beholden to Google, or they pretend to be enterprising and forward looking with many promising projects
I just want Firefox's search box to be on the top of the window so I don't have to bend my neck when I'm surfing in bed... I don't use it just for that.
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Particularly weird impulse for technically inclined people…
Although I must admit to the guilty pleasure of gleefully using Chromium-only features in internal apps where users are guaranteed to run Edge.
Are you old enough to have suffered through the ie6 corporate mess?
Firefox is safe from this because their CSS handling was the first thing they rewrote in Rust.
I mean, even if it was written in c or c++, its unlikely two separate code bases would have the exact same use after feee vuln.
It's unlikely, but it does actually happen. I've seen more than one complete rewrite of something important that had exactly the same bug. And I'm very sure that those sources were not related somehow.
Does the Rust implementation not use any unsafe and does not use libraries using unsafe?
No. What would be the point of that?
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Firefox and Safari are fine in this case, yeah.
No, though Firefox has its own CVE this week: https://thecyberexpress.com/firefox-v147-cve-2026-2447/
It's pretty hard to have an accidental a use after free in the FireFox CSS engine because it is mostly safe Rust. It's possible, but very unlikely.
That came to my mind as well. CSS was one of the earliest major applications of Rust in FireFox. I believe that work was when the "Fearless Concurrency" slogan was popularized.
Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.
If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.
Firefox and Safari developers dared the Chromium team to implement :has() and Houdini and this is the result!
/s
Yes, because nobody uses it