Comment by jeroenhd
1 day ago
When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.
As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
I hope you're not implying that that reaction to Mozilla going against the only reason anyone has to use Firefox is unwarranted.
> When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet
i.e. when firefox does it, people wonder why they aren't using chrome. That's the entire point. The only thing that makes firefox attractive is if they don't do what google does, and they do almost everything google does.
Even if it results in extended campaigns of complaints and hostility from their most devoted users, and the loss of 95% of their installs. As far as I can tell the only thing they backed down on was destroying ublock, and that's because they recognized that it was an existential threat to firefox. The 3% market share that they have now would have become 0.3%, no matter what google did to prop them up.
I certainly don't recommend firefox any more. The amount of effort I have to go through to get the standard 2010 experience quality is absurd and I can't expect anyone else to think it's worth it. It's not worth it to dodge any of this bad behavior anymore, it's industry standard. Going through the effort of dodging it makes you stand out more, and makes you more trackable and targetable. For me it's just compulsive, and my values don't change when the values of the crowd changes. But I can't expect anyone else to download and maintain a git repo that allows you to have basic control over your UI, or to fill out captchas after every pageload.
If you're going to use plain firefox, you might as well use plain chrome. Both of them have the same degree of respect for you, and both of them are owned by the same company. Using plain firefox for freedom is like using an Android phone for freedom. It's amusing that google gets to play the "bad guy" in one of those stories (browser wars) and gets to play the "good guy" in the other (mobile wars.) It's all keyfabe. None of these companies are competing with each other.
> while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Wise words.
I, being a Firefox user with practically zero Chromium use, would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does. And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
> would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does.
Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.
> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.
Mozilla is nice enough to let you opt out.
I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
Offering something like a local Gemma 4 (though apparently not what we get here) to web apps via a browser API could change UX quite drastically. Possibly for the better. We had a project where it could have been nice.
> "RMS style curl works for me unless I can have Hatsune Miku"
> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.
EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.
Google has invested significantly in security. I believe you are referring to privacy?
Correct, Google has invested significantly in securing themselves from their users.
Having rock-solid security for quietly transferring all of your deeply personal and private data to Google feels like a win for the pedants, but a loss for everyone else.
This is a significant point. To many people security includes privacy, which is a fair assumption: in a non-evil timeline user privacy will be one of the first-class components high on the priority list for being secured. Unfortunately companies and the people high up running them only care about their own privacy¹, everyone else is expected to be grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.
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[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…
Oh, you right, thanks for pointing this out. Indeed, I referred to privacy.
Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.
Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.
Not supporting real ad blockers makes it strictly less secure for any threat model that matters for normal people - most importantly less secure against predatory corporations like Google.
Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.
Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?
Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)
Defense is not very meaningful if your browser is provided by one of the parties you need to defend yourself yourself _against_.