Comment by Night_Thastus
8 hours ago
I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.
We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.
Lina Khan is lying in wait.
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I couldn't agree more with your point. But also, precisely because I agree with you, I'm flashing back to Proton CEO Andy Yen claiming that Trump would be great on tech anti trust and an improvement on what came before, which was ridiculous from the moment he said it but symptomatic of a certain kind of tech bro mindset.
If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
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Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.
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We wouldn't be in this mess is Obama wasn't sleep at the wheel. When it's been 20 years with a 10 to 10 split its not a democrat vs republican issue.
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
I look forward to a new era of trust busting.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
Was saying this about Chrome and Android a decade ago.
> Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android need to be separate companies.
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
YouTube really could hold up as its own company these days.
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I'd like to nominate, Amazon marketplace, Amazon Ads and AWS to be separate as well please. ;)
I really wish we had an admin that would be willing to do this.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
The latter two potentially yes, as they can sell a product. Chrome - not so much: sell the browser, embed ads… nothing palatable.
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> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
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We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
Trustbusting is like weeding your garden. It's just a chore that must be done periodically to counteract the natural tendency of markets to degenerate into monopolies. It's not something you do once and then never again, it's something that you have to do regularly, forever, if you want a functioning market.
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This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
I'm quite torn on this.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.
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Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Companies flooding the space with ads making the internet unusable != strong economy to counter china?
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anti monopoly actions != weak economy
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
Drumming up incoherent fears about China is the new favorite oligarch talking point, yes.
The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA
> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
> it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users
Remember when Microsoft was sued for having installed one browser in their OS and making it default?
Now suddenly we're okay with another company installing another browser in their OS
I use firefox and sometimes safari. I had to install chrome recently, and I don’t understand how people stand it. It’s a half-assed attempt to reimplement windows 95 era preload spam. (Or non-decrapified win11).
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
My hope is the chrome fanboys get forced to experience the full visceral web and revolt.
Will Google employees who used UBO now vomit over their own corp decisions and reverse?
They are in a tough place.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
> They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
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Windows is not really a growing user base in a lot of places it is in decline.
Most "internet users" are mobile. The ones using windows are doing it from work laptops that are locked down and use edge (chrome).
If windows was a growing market MS would not be so far down the extraction path they have gone with the OS.
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Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Firefox has 1.4 billion in reserves and no debt.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
I don't think you get the compensation for devs capable of working on this stuff.
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> how to pay for that
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.
You say that, but out of the remaining users of FF, I severely doubt even 1% would pay. Any attempt to paywall would kill whatever they have left.
I've donated to thunderbird since they made a promise that won't go into other weird/stupid mozilla ventures.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
Being beholden to Google who might decide that the risk of antitrust is lower than the price they are paying for that search box is a pretty precarious place to be in.
The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
It's still 200 million monthly active users according to https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.
To a degree, sure, but is it really 'MITM' if the site you are trying to visit has chosen to add cloudflare into the middle?
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
"What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?"
Without Cloudflare it's highly unlikely that 20% of websites _would_ implement the same logic.
The second I see that awful Cloudflare countdown I blacklist the site and never return.
I am convinced all their metrics saying they reduce bot traffic are mistaken for the fact that they reduce all traffic by annoying users away.
Gatekeeping internet and reading every byte unencrypted. Nice business monopoly.
Firefox is still popular in Germany, at around 10%
I remember when it was the last bastion of Firefox users with a majority marketshare there when everyone else already switched to Chrome...
I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front. Nonetheless, I use FF as much as I can on both my mobile and desktop devices.
I do prefer Firefox devtools to Chrome, that's one of the reasons I use it at work.
I think both are kind of equivalent nowadays but I find that the Firefox one has a better design and looks more polished
> I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front.
Genuine curiosity: what's it lacking?
The CLI tools for automation are still a pain to use and missing functionality, which also means LLMs use it less; Claude gives up when it sees Chrome isn’t installed unless I specifically tell it to try and use Firefox.
I created an automation tool recently for taking screenshots (for SOC2 reporting, hopefully tptacek is proud), and getting it working with FF on the CLI was very painful (but necessary since I needed my cookies!)
Yeah I'm not sure what they are talking about...
Joke: it doesn't have 80% market share.
But also with AI, the most I'm doing is hitting inspect and sending problem elements. Maybe screen resizing for mobile.
I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.
Try using ladybird as a fit alternative. It will be complete within your lifetime, and maybe even in firefox’s lifetime.
I’ve stopped supporting it once Kling decided to stop accepting community contributions.
The entire point was that it was a browser built by a warm and friendly community, and not corporate interests.
I have no hope that they will keep their other values if they’ve already been so quick to let this one go.
> I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.
So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.
I'm more of an optimist!
We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!
IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.
Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.
But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
Typing this from Zen browser as we speak, can't suggest it enough.
Such a wonderful take on Firefox. The only thing it is really missing to make it perfect for everyone is proper sync not just on one computer but across systems.
Without wanting to sound rude: you're talking about browsers – serious business. Most hackers – I feel – need a bit more than 'I strongly suggest it' to even consider switching to a nascent browser :D
The main issue is security. The browser is the most sensitive piece of of software you can run on a machine. It’s susceptible to both supply chain and JS attacks and a huge target for both of them.
it’s a firefox fork. ‘most hackers’ would research it no matter what was typed on a msg board prior to installing. the first step is knowingg about it. personally, im a big fan and daily drive it on my personal systems. but I do find their tab groups implementations to be a bit subpar.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.
I use it exclusively on Android for the ad block on naughty hot girl sites wink wink.
I use chrome and those sites are miserable.
I think a lot of us would pay them at this point, if they kept seriously working on the browser.
I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>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.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
I have never had any scrolling lag issues on Firefox (in the form of Fennec from F-Droid) on GrapheneOS.
Native Firefox on native Android (or at least the Samsung variant) here and I haven't had issues either.
I've had the issue on multiple phones. Firefox nightly seemed to fix it for a while but it suffers from it too after a while. I need to test if it's UBO or the sister comment that says closing tabs and restarting helps. It's only on certain sites I really notice it, maybe JS or video heavy sites. NYTimes in particular.
> Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome.
It starts to lag after a while on some sites but force-stopping occasionally fixes it for me.
Vanadium is a good browser but I wish it had Firefox's Private Mode toggle, for permanent private mode *
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
** (Yes I know this is upstream behaviour.)
firefox has a setting on ios version that blocks ads so maybe they will get more market share that way?
This move will help Firefox a lot. This is why they've been my browser on mobile for years, now there's a big incentive to switch on desktop
I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.
There was a period in time, few years ago, when I was going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, driven by alternate paranoia about privacy vs performance. These days I don't really have to. Firefox on Android, at least for the phones I regularly used, like several OnePlus from 7T up and now razr ultra, has been very stable. Only blip was the one month I was on Pixel 10- turns out they have special hardware optimization for Chrome that cripples Firefox on Pixel 10 otherwise. All the more reason to (return the phone and) stick to Firefox.
Same. I found Firefox was fast on Windows at the time, but on Mac it was so slow (compared to Chrome), and had weird non-native scrolling for the longest time. As a Mac user it felt like they developed for Windows, and occasionally do some work on the Mac app too.
Well, open it…
I can definitely say the performance is good now, though
On Mac it is very obviously quite a bit worse than both Chrome and Safari.
[dead]
I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
> I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
Um.... If I learned anything from Apple, the best and brightest don't matter. Capitalism forces the best and brightest to make apps for the walled prison because the masses saw someone dancing with colorful backgrounds.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.
I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.
The core will have to still be a solid battle tested thing. Imagine having to worry about if your vibed browser is quietly dropping some elements. Firefox and Chromium browsers are valuable because they are the targets, if a site doesn't render properly in them, it can be said that the site is wrong.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Vibe coding is obviously not quite there yet right now. But in the future it will be. The output of agents will be just as correct and rock solid as the software from the most experienced software developers. We'll also have the additional advantage of there being existing browsers to use as an oracle to test against to ensure that nothing regresses.
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I used to use firefox a long time ago but got tired of all the memory leaks and lag before I switched to chrome.
Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.