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My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.

The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.

Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.

> If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services

This is the crux of it.

If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.

A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)

It's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.

I love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.

Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.

Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.

The problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS.

I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.

>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.

I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.

> filter malicious ads out of their own ad services

It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.

Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.

Ad blocking has always been a safety issue.

Google doesn't care about this. Try searching for a locksmith in your area on Google and the top results are all scans.

> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.

Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would your parents even notice?

The kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc.

They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.

Money from confused seniors getting scammed is a critical revenue stream. Without scams, ads are far less viable.

Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.

> They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it.

You could even extend that to OS as well.

Get Chromebook for them, I know it is backwards, but at least they won't install viruses.

A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.

This needs to stop.

It feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same.

Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]

The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.

[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.

> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.

This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.

> My parents are at an age where they fall for things.

If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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'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

Firefox is still popular in Germany, at around 10%

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 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.

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.

Try using ladybird as a fit alternative. It will be complete within your lifetime, and maybe even in firefox’s lifetime.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.

Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released

Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.

Was that before Google removed "don't be evil" ? Good thing they weren't doing anything sketchy before that ;)

Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.

Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".

I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.

I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap.

Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.

I will keep the same

It was astonishing how you fell for it back then.

In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!

It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837

Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.

When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.

If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...

A - Billions

B - not Billions

The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012.

All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.

It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.

Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.

They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].

As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.

[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...

I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.

For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.

Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.

On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.

So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.

That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.

I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/chromium-profiles

Or just run pihole or any other dns blocking service

AFAIK firefox also will remove MV2

Yeah I don’t seem to feel any performance or functionality degradation myself. What <X> ad blocking related feature has been made impossible with MV3?

Isn’t the idea that over time chrome will limit what ubo lite blocks? It will phase out all of its own ad networks so they’re not blocked first, but it’s possible they also start allowing third party ads through for a price.

Blame the brain damaged judge that literally told Google

"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."

Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.

(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)

Can't wait until we are forced to actually make Linux Phone systems actually good, but no one will invest until Android is closed

AND try to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle and other similar products made by asshole companies.

I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.

Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.

This exact issue is why I have been paying for my e-mails for the last 5 years.

And in the case of Brave the ad blocker is built into the browser itself.

Brave Browser offers "Brave-hosted" versions of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.

Zen is genuinely so nice. I have been a Safari die hard because for so long it’s been remarkable at resource efficiency. After switching my macOS window management to aerospace, Zen finally got me to switch away. And it’s great that it loads all the Firefox extensions.

You don't have to turn off any crypto stuff.

Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.

Doesnt matter which browser you use, if you don't have proper adblock in it, the pages will load waaaay slower than any other engine.

If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.

Yeah, kind of the same. Out of the other "firefox" clones, Waterfox is my goto.

I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.

I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.

Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.

Brave does what it says on the tin: It's another Blink based browser that is now rather mature and trouble free. It's supported by very responsive developers that provide a fully integrated ad blocking engine that is superior to every browser add-on/extension solution ever created.

That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.

I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.

I love it as a browser. The startup screen shocks me every now and then, pimping some crypto shit or another, but other than that, it's good.

I'm with you. I've been riding with Safari for almost 20 years now. It's been nothing but great for me. I cannot think of a time I have used a website that did not function properly in Safari.

Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?

Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.

Why do you think it's called 'Lite'? Are you going to argue that Google did us a favor by benevolently removing functionality?

For now

Last year, I moved back to Firefox after a decade or so exclusively on Chrome, which is something I'd been procrastinating about doing for some time.

It was mostly painless. Bookmarks were automatic. I had some extensions to reconfigure and some passwords to migrate to a different password manager.

I wished I'd gotten it over with sooner.

This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.

Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.

https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/gatew...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-tag-gateway-for-advertise...

In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.

And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.

Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.

I am a webdev and sometimes I have issues with ungoogled-chromium so I switched to firefox. One time I had to debug a push notification issue and realized ungoogled-chromium simply doesn't support it (but never displayed information about that when registering the service worker). That was years ago, situation might be different now.

It is nerfed.

Mozilla has had their share of mass extension deprecation and breakage.

You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.

I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.

Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?

The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.

I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.

As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.

Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.

If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.

Safari is fantastic for me. Passwords app integration alone is a killer feature.

Okay, so first.

Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.

Second,

God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.

Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help

My number one reason. Safari won’t let me customize the search engine. If I had that I would use safari all day long.

Because for enterprise with Google login you literally can't login with anything else except official Chrome.

I've used Linux exclusively for over 20 years. What is its "OS browser"?

I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.

The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.

Is edge Different here? It's also dropping ubo anyway.

I prefer Firefox on mobile for supporting ublock personally and I don't see why I would use a different browser on my desktop.

I'm still using Arc, I wonder when I'll lose UBO support. That'll be the day I switch back to Firefox.

> Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?

Because Edge sucks, and FF is better than Safari.

It is not without its fair share of faults, but I stay on Firefox because of multi account containers

I use multiple OSes. I do not want a different list of extensions and preferences on each machine I am on. Firefox makes it simple and uniform.

"Safari" and "beautiful" in the same sentence?

It's not. It's barely functional, slower than Chrome, and always trails it in feature compatibility.

Safari was always the Internet Explorer 6 of the Internet. Archaic, quirky, way behind on useful new APIs. Perhaps things have changed recently.

> Why not just use Safari?

I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.

Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.

Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.

I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.

Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.

One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.

Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.