Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
66 comments
·March 10, 2025worble
The rhetoric around Firefox is so exhausting. They change some wording while having made no actual technical changes to the browser and the internet is on fire for days calling them the devil incarnate, meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it.
What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
mkl
From long experience we expect Google and hence Chrome to act against our interests. We have not expected that of Mozilla and Firefox.
Google did give us a lot of warning that they would greatly restrict ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, so most of that angst has already been and gone.
InDubioProRubio
But firefox always was a monopoly figleave sockpuppet - and now they do not need it anymore, so firefox either finds a new purpose (doing what it promised) or it tries to sell out in one final scam.
lukan
Well, no one (sane) has any illusions left about chrome.
But FF was supposed to remain the shiny counterexample (despite acting also shady since years).
magicalhippo
> meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it
Because anyone who cared knew this was coming in the near future after they published manifest v3 several years ago. Back then there was a huge kerfuffle, but since then anyone who cared has moved on.
refulgentis
> What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
Hm, my lived experience is the inverse, and both seem sort of important to talk about.
We've been hearing about Chrome implementing the same privacy protections as Safari as a transgression for years, years, and years, as it was delayed again and again.
It was ex-Mozilla people who brought to my attention that they were deeply alarmed by the privacy-concious-Do-Not-Track people making this pivot and that it was a really bad sign.
Generally, I try to avoid loaded questions phrased like "why is X considered as A while Y is considered as B?" because it suffers from high failure rates
(likelihood you're the first person to realize the truth; likelihood these things ended up sorted neatly into opposing binaries; undecidability of 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?'; uncomfortable conversation when someone starts from 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?' and you have to sort of lead them gently to 'is it possible you are missing something, not everyone else?' without making it obvious)
stupidbrowsers
> Hm, my lived experience is the inverse
You better start believing in ghost stories. You're in one.
TiredOfLife
>there was barely any noise about it.
10 posts daily about it on HN.
TiredOfLife
>What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
It's not the resources. It's their holier than thou attitude.
staticelf
[flagged]
crowselect
Mozilla revenue in 2014, the year eich was made ceo: $329.6M
Mozilla revenue in 2015, having “gone woke” and fired him: $421.3M
Go woke go earn 28% more, i guess?
wave-function
Not to throw this discussion on too long a tangent, but this honestly reads in exactly the same way as fawning comments about Putin "saving his country" by presiding over a period of record-high oil prices.
On the bright side, he and his cronies didn't steal absolutely everything, and some scraps made it to the rest of the population.
Mozilla's leadership is a cancer that will kill it, and will take the work of many good, talented technical people down the drain. IRL parallels abound.
staticelf
And.. where does the revenue come from?
Nearly all increase is from Google and their deal with them, a deal that was done before Brendan became CEO. So the revenue would increase no matter who became CEO.
okkdev
It's such a funny and incredibly stupid rhetoric to blame the "woke".
staticelf
You come here to write that, but you never bother to tell us why?
The issue with "wokeness" is that the people who adhere to these ideologies tries to shoehorn it into every single aspect of their lives and to every single thing they possibly can. Everything must be political, everything is about what they think matter and so on.
That's why you see companies fail so massively when ruled by people like this. They can't help themselves and alienate people, completely unnecessary, and usually turn supporters into haters.
hnlmorg
It’s a bit premature to say Mozilla’s change to user agreements should result in a loss of our trust.
Particularly given the browser itself is open source and already has many eyes on it.
I’m going to wait and see what Mozilla’s next few releases are like before passing judgement.
bad_user
One thing that bothers me is that, when smaller projects and companies get boycotted, the winners seem to always be US Big Tech companies that are far worse, and boycotts don't work against them either.
For what is worth, I still use Firefox.
If you fear Mozilla's telemetry going forward, you could pick a fork that disables it. E.g., Mullvad or Zen seem pretty good.
But on the other hand, if you really want to get off the Firefox bandwagon, yes, Chromium-based browsers are a viable alternative. Although, in my view, there are only 2 Chromium-based browsers that are fairly trustworthy (i.e., well updated, not insecure) and that are not full-on spyware: Vivaldi and Brave.
Regardless, the “forks” are good only for disabling features that you don't want. But keep in mind that the hard work is still done by Mozilla, Google or Apple, it costs a shit ton of money to maintain a browser engine and all of them are financed by ad-tech (Google's ad-tech to be more specific).
bambax
You can trust or distrust whoever you want, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Firefox. They now have updated the wording of their TOS that caused so much uproar and confusion (in part fueled by Brendan Eich, who runs a competing browser) and are pretty clear about what they do.
Firefox also still supports Manifest V2, which lets you use the full, ultra-powerful version of uBlock Origin. There's no better privacy protection than uBlock.
Firefox is a much better choice than any Chromium based browser for the privacy conscious.
bad_user
> in part fueled by Brendan Eich
I don't get why you needed to mention this, when the story became viral before Brendan Eich communicated it.
Do you feel that people misunderstood that, in fact, Mozilla does intend to sell user data?
Note that I'm still using and advocating for Firefox, I just found this offtopic attack odd.
promoterr
Chrome was NEVER (and won't be ever) the option.. https://contrachrome.com/
foxhill
you can't be serious, surely?
yes, mozilla's TOS update is a bad thing, but switching to chrome (or chromium-based) for it is really cutting your nose to spite your face.
timeon
> you can't be serious, surely?
Probably rage-bait.
botanical
It's funny how Mozilla is being vilified non-stop this past week when nothing's really changed (only their legal wording). Whereas Google are literally personal information vampires; they make the web a worse place for people and their freedoms.
I will continue supporting Mozilla and using Firefox.
OuterVale
I have a few notes on alternative browsers at the bottom of this article that might be of use. https://vale.rocks/posts/everything-is-chrome#taking-action
mkl
You may have missed Mozilla's update: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms..., discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
I don't think trust in Firefox should be gone.
benrutter
I think it's great that we're able to hold mozilla to higher standards than google, but I think there's a couple important points to mention:
- Leaving firefox for chrome due to privacy concerns only makes sense if chrome has better privacy, which it definitely doesn't. Recent changes might bring them closer together, but firefox is very far from catching up.
- We should compare firefox to chrome or firefox-based to chromium-based. Browsers like waterfox, pale moon, edge, brave all use source code from one browser but with different privacy, so it doesn't make sense to say "I don't like firefox so I'll use a chromium based one".
- Bonus extra point just because this is hacker news, check out Ladybird, it's making awesome progress!
crowselect
Yeah: firefox.
Is the browser ecosystem supposed to get better if we collapse it to just webkit and blink? Websites track us, browsers track us, web extensions track us, ISPs track us, OSs track us, cell networks track us.
Government passing legit privacy laws is the literal only way to prevent this - not browser choice. Unfortunately gov is fully captured by corporate interests most places in the world.
rusticpenn
I have been out of the loop, what happened with Firefox?
conceptme
added new terms of use which are very questionable: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
Double_a_92
I think the conclusion was that they had to remove that for legal reasons, since technically they were already doing something that could be considered selling data.
moefh
They have never clarified what they're doing that is not really selling data but legally "could be considered selling data". I understand that's how they tried to spin it, there's a very telling update[1] written two days later:
The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
Don't get me wrong, even after this I still use Firefox and I think it's better than Chrome in the privacy axis. But it's really annoying that they're still trying to paint themselves treating your privacy as sacred when that's obviously not the case.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
lll-o-lll
So. Maybe they should stop doing that thing?
stupidbrowsers
Yes, I heard it was because of Pocket. Of course, they could have just been transparent about ti when people asked about it.
zo1
Including: "Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for ANY reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore." Emphasis mine.
Holy smokes. Mozilla is slowly tightening their grip on Firefox. We're looking at another SourceForge/StackOverflow/Reddit type of private equity takeover, I'm sure.
Edit. Forgot: StackOverflow and Trello on that list.
null
As a privacy conscious user that loves open source software, I'm really puzzled regarding browsers right now. It's confusing.
It feels like basically everything is Chrome nowadays.
Are there any alternatives to Chrome-based browsers?
Best wishes and have a wonderful week