Don't Ditch Firefox: It's the Web's Last Hope for Browser Diversity

There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.

I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.

I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?

Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:

- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome

- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine

- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream

- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it

- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features

- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork

- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions

- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?

If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.

For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:

https://blitz.is/wpt

The headline results are:

- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)

- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)

- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)

- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)

- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)

So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.

(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)

(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).

Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.

Of my cohorts, I am probably the most loyal firefox fan. That said, I've broken up with it twice, and am currently in the second breakup b/c at work we're mandated to use the Island browser due to security reasons, and my work machine absolutely cannot handle two browsers running while I also have all of the work dependencies and IDEs and slack running.

I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.

Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.

https://ladybird.org/

I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.

Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".

Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.

It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point:

"Do I need to access Big Tech services?"

As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.

This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".

Lynx revolution when?