You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.

After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.

1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.

2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.

Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").

Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)

1. These can all be disabled by advanced users (largely without consequence)

2. They dont prevent things like installing apps or even gaining root access in the first place.

The very fact that you can install Linux is evidence of the different approach taken with macs (you can't easily install Linux of ios devices)

I have always been able to.

I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).

Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.

Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.

Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.

But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?

Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that). Personally, I haven't had to resort to a non-Firefox browser or user agent spoof even once in well over a year now.

find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.

I definitely run into pages broken in firefox desktop or especially firefox mobile. Extra especially on proofs of concept advertised here on HN.

Many see 'it works on Chrome and mobile Safari' as 'it works' and they can get project signoff / ship / get paid / whatever and don't care about other users

The company that has the application may not know until a few users complain (if they complain) and by that point it could be too late due to the contract, or they may not understand what a different browser is or care either.

Sure, go ahead and install Firefox, LineageOS, etc. (I did so too and am a happy user of both). But I'm just saying that this is not fighting the monopoly in any way, it's just retreating into a bubble where we can ignore it for a while.

I have no answers as to what to do instead, but I think acknowledging that a strategy has failed would be a useful first step.

    * uBlock Origin
    * Privacy Badger
    * Multi-Account Containers
    * Flagfox
    * Cookie Autodelete

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.

For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.

The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.

This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.

Here's the ones I hit and reported: ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail.

I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.

Also names like "Adblock Plus" scare me. I don't want someone I don't trust getting my web activity.

However, the software seems safe. Their privacy policy says they only store websites locally, and never upload them to servers. The app is also open-source.

Ad Block Plus is not privacy respecting. They collect usage data as well as unique device identifiers.

Otherwise, though, Safari still supports MV2. Everyone seems to think webRequestBlocking is the only relevant change in MV3, but it's not. Equally important IMO is arbitrary JavaScript injection into web pages, which MV2 allows but MV3 does not.

MV3 is so locked down that you can't even use String.replace() with a constructed JavaScript function. It's really a nightmare.

Google's excuse is that all JavaScript needs to be statically declared in the extension so that the Chrome Web Store can review it. But then the Chrome Web Store allows a bunch of malware to be published anyway!

In Chrome 135, which is very recent—the public is currently on Chrome 138—Google added an execute() method to run an individual script. However, the API is not available from the extension content script, so if it needs to be triggered from the content script, you have to make an async call to the background script (or more accurately, the background service worker, which is a whole other nightmare of MV3). Moreover, the API accepts only a string for JS code or a filename; you still can't use a Function() constructor for example.

In Chrome 138, the current version, Google switched from developer mode to a dedicated userscripts permission toggle in the extension details, which is disabled by default. I think Google is still working on but has not finished a permissions request API. Remember this is almost SEVEN YEARS after Google first announced Manifest V3. The entire time, Google has been stalling, foot dragging, practically getting dragged kicking and screaming into doing the least possible work here.

Surprisingly this async serialize/deserialize nature of the API (https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/blob/cdfc253c07... ?) somehow still manages to inject and execute scripts fast enough to make them act like content scripts at document_start. The only problem is no arbitration between extensions, cant force Tampermonkey inject before uBO (tons of adblock filters disable functions required for Tampermonkey and effectively kill Tampermonkey in the process).

George Carlin: "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."

The interests of APPLE (who makes money on hardware, and credit card processing) don't align with the interests of Google (who makes money on ad's). I am all for open source, I'm all for alternatives. But honestly if you own an iPhone and a Mac then safari makes a lot of sense. I happen to use safari and Firefox on Mac and am happy to bounce back and forth.

I also keep an eye on ladybird, but it isnt ready for prime time.

And I'm still going to have a chrome install for easy flashing of devices.

Sorry to break it to you, but yes, they are.

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