The only reason we cannot have a single browser engine that everyone uses is governance and ownership.
That's the key problem with Chromium, it is largely under Google's thumb. If control of Chromium could be fairly split between Apple/Google/Microsoft/Mozilla/et al within a nonprofit, with no one party having ownership or override, Firefox could be Chromium based.
The thing a lot of people ignore is that having one OSS engine that everyone uses is the most efficient way for all parties. You just have to solve governance and ownership, which aren't technical problems (they're about power).
And, yes, standards would largely be dictated via this one monopoly-engine but again if governance and ownership were healthy that too wouldn't be problematic within itself (you could even include standards orgs/committees within the structure).
User choice would largely be the add-ins, unique settings, niche features, and UI (see Chrome Vs. Edge Vs. Brave, for example).
I disagree that this would be a good idea. I think it’s important that the Standard rather than an Implementation is the source of correctness.
Also, rendering engines are so tightly tied to the underlining drawing apis of different platforms this would be impractical and stifle innovation.
Safari, for example, is more closely tied to the drawing apis in iOS and MacOS, which in turn are tuned to the hardware Apple sells. This allows it to be more energy efficient, particularly on mobile.
You could abstracts the drawing with an intermediate api, but that prevents different browsers from experiments or moving toward different drawing architectures.
I've made this comment before. It seems to me that there is an almost unsolvable information theoretic problem with the human language spec approach. Browsers need to have a standard specification for interoperability and one that includes an open source reference implementation of the core parts. Chromium seems to have become that standard.
I argue here against pure natural language specifications in favor code based specs. I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification. Natural language words are incredibly polysemic and contextual. Look for example, at how many meanings the word "break" has: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
The ideal language for a pure specification might be a mix of natural language and pseudo code with a pseudo test suit. However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.
Other technical fields usually go beyond language for specifications, using blueprints and diagrams which are their version of code.
I would argue that modern platforms with pull request based workflows that tie discussions to version controlled code changes are also the progression of this line of thought.
A cleaned up version of these might make sense for a specification.
And I get some of the concerns. While natural language under specifies, reference implementations over specify. This is more of a problem with low level languages however. Modern, high level languages are getting fairly close to a form of pseudo code. I fully agree that the reference implementations shouldn't contain or should hide, low level optimizations. I also understand that reference implementations can unduly tie specs to specific hardware, OSs and platforms.
But to me, over-specification is less of a problem than under-specification and it can be mitigated by labeling particular functions or blocks of code as implementation specific and not part of the spec.
Without spec written in code, the different implementations always have subtle incompatibilities. I see egregious versions of under-specification in government where horrendously vague specs are created in order to issue RFPs for getting software built. They usually end up with non working software at mind blowing cost.
People have this weird misconception that they are contracting out to build software. They are not. Building software is really easy. You press the build button or type the compile command. Building software has been fully automated for a while now. What is difficult is designing software and specifying what it must do. This is because there is a vast jungle of protocols, business flows, hardware and software platforms that need to be interacted in different ways for different needs. This is what needs to be specified and only computer code can do it adequately.
I wish that Mozilla adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
> However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.
I disagree there. Not in every circumstance. If the people on the business side are devs, then sure. Technical-minded non-devs can be taught to write their specs in a domain-specific pseudo-language without needing to learn about implementation details or deeper programming language knowledge/concepts, or deal with technical debt. Something on the order of writing JSON for an API.
>I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification.
Standard language, no. Several fields such as law, sciences, philosophy handle it by defining their own jargon. The first year of university often focus on onboarding students to the terminology so they can effectively communicate on the subject matter and understand papers. Natural language version of DSLs.
I mean legal code is a bit like computer code with judges being the interpreters. It might be practically the closest they can get to something like computer code. I still think for software, you might as well use actual computer code in most cases. Code is our DSL.
What you say is true, and the way to solve it is a small minimal spec rather than these 5k page ones that try to describe every bit of detail. HTML4/javascript/css were eminently approachable, the problem is the loads and loads of edge case API's/etc that have been stuffed into the browser to make it a "platform" are the problem these days. The browser IMHO should have been allowed to be something you write applications in, rather than a fancy display terminal. There are no ends of technical reasons why its a bad idea, but you have a couple powerful corps that see it in their interest (because they can control it) so it happened.
As soon as you start to create "platforms" its inevitable that a single organization will monopolize it.
Lately I've been thinking that the "perfect" programming language would be a specification language that precisely defines the relationship between outputs and inputs. Given that, the next step is to 'compile' this specification to a set of tests and (possibly naive) implementations. Profiling then tells the programmer which components of the implementation need improvement and the programmer touches them up and the test verifies they are still correct.
If Microsoft, Apple, and Google all disagree with WHATWG or W3C, they're winning regardless of whether or not Firefox exists.
The second scenario is just repeating the problems with Chromium.
In theory, if one engine was agreed upon as ideal and collaborated on fairly, the other parties could just fork it and maintain that branch separately from the usurper and make that the standard.
If everything were based on Chromium, and Google really wanted FLoC, how would that play out?
They'd add support to the codebase and... what? Everyone else would fork? Or how about for DRM support?
It's the "collaborated on fairly" that's the difficult and unsustainable piece. Especially when we're talking last mile things (i.e. that interact with the user) and the additional rewards those entice less altruistic parties with.
Java/Oracle/IBM is what you realistically get when there's serious $$$s on the table and multiple parties. And that's probably about the best possible outcome.
There's at least Windows, macOS, FreeBSD as popular and fairly used alternatives.
Also, the Linux kernel itself is just one small part of a Linux distro, which means everyone from kernel maintainers, to distro creators/maintainers, to particular app makers have some direct to indirect sway on the kernel development.
Note that Chromium hasn't been based on WebKit for almost a decade. Google forked WebKit and created Blink as their rendering engine in 2013. The two have diverged quite a bit. Safari is the only major browser still based on WebKit explicitly. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Samsung Internet, etc., are all based on Chromium and thus have Blink as their rendering engine.
"The Linux kernel", in this analogy, doesn't also own a major cloud platform and/or device ecosystem and/or top ranked websites.
I think in the 21st century we should have clearer glasses about what key enablers corporations can leverage to push their visions, even on ostensibly open source codebases.
> The only reason we cannot have a single browser engine that everyone uses is governance and ownership.
Consider the governance and ownership angle a little more.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are LARGE companies. These companies do things that many have ethical issues with. Putting a bunch of large companies in such a point of control is something that should give people pause.
Large multi-national companies aren't democracies and their end goals are fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. These are often super wealthy or large funds.
Incorrect. The easiest place to see where this breaks down is in backwards compatibility.
Web browsers need to be backwards compatible with the vast majority of web pages out there. That's half the point of the Web.
If you define standards by implementation, you can never fix bugs once web sites start using them. (If you think you can just tell web sites to suck it up, consider the vast number of configuration web pages burned into ROM. And yes, they do use new features.)
The standards themselves have this problem already, even though they're at a much higher level. (See Appendix B in the JS spec, for example.) The problem is far, far worse at the lower level of implementation.
Relying on a single implementation will quickly produce the next IE6. And if you think Google programmers (or any company X's programmers) are good enough to avoid that sort of thing, then consider how well resourced those programmers will become once there's no longer competition or even a basis for comparison.
Google tried this with WebKit. But they had to fork it to Blink because Apple is a very poor steward of open source. So that will always be the problem.
Google forking WebKit to make Blink has nothing to do with pore stewardship of open source. They have different agendas and Google wanted total control.
Would such shared stewardship of Chromium really help, though? I don't believe that a shared governance structure for Chromium would stop Google from going their own way with Chrome, while effectively yielding the same problems.
"Oops, we added this experimental feature to Chrome, now it's be come a de facto standard, I guess you all had better let us upstream it!"
EDIT: Or even worse, they stop upstreaming anything at all!
Firefox doesn't help with this though. Chromium is technically superior, thanks to all of the money Google has invested in it. Chromium is open-source and there are many popular forks (Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, ungoogled). Those forks provide a much more robust "safety net" than Firefox does. If Google starts pushing something egregious on users, I'm sure Vivaldi and Brave would jump at the opportunity to promote their forks without that problem. And have you seem the Edge ads?
I hope I will never have to use Chrome again and I love Firefox but sometimes it's a PITA.
It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character.
I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
Executive pay does not follow the product's success. It follows the broader market for executives.
If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum.
This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
> Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else)
I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
Bingo. And so you hit the dilemma of trying to be an ethical company in an unethical environment. If Mozilla decreases their executive compensation, then they can't compete for the same executives that less-ethical companies who don't care about worker wages can. People complaining about Mozilla's executive compensation are asking for Mozilla to hobble themselves.
What ethics are we talking about here? Mozilla leadership carried out two large layoffs rounds whilst drastically increasing their own salaries. They already have unethical leaders.
For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc.
Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now.
If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
Have you looked at the chart in the link I provided? Mozilla was doing better and had more revenue with previous management who's compensation was a fraction of current management's.
I'm skeptical of some of Mozilla's focus, but Firefox is over 20 years old and over 20MM lines of code. They've been putting a lot of attention to it for a long time (and some incredible work has come from it, including within the past five years).
I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention.
It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
> I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development
+1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
> I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company.
To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive.
Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates.
Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)
Mozilla is working as hard as they can to regress though!
I haven’t been excited for a browser upgrade in years. I see these announcements and I know I’ll lose time re-learning something or just missing old functionality that has been removed.
The Mozilla of 2022 is very much only the least evil option.
I love Firefox over Chrome in almost every single aspect....except, I cannot shake the feel it still leaks memory like crazy. Open several tabs, then a couple of youtube tabs (you know how people are), eventually the machine is slow as molasses, you close 50% of the tabs (including the youtube ones) and you get back like 10% of the memory, so you need to restart the browser. That gets old, fast.
IIRC, Firefox doesn't always give back memory when the machine has free memory. If you start running other high memory processes, then Firefox might dump some memory. The reason for this is 1) there's not much point in freeing memory if it will be unused and 2) switching web pages is something browsers do a lot, and freeing and then reallocating large chunks of memory is a significant performance hit.
That's fantastic in theory, not so much in practice. Visual studio code crawls into a halt and the only way to "get it back" it is restarting Firefox, even if it had just one tab opened.
Well it crashes my computer like 3 times a day on Linux, I now know its because of hardware acceleration, but I don't expect average users to keep using Firefox. I'm just getting tired of all the things that is happening to Firefox. Although I've been using it for the past 10 years, I might have to look for alternatives.
If it's crashing your computer you can pretty squarely place the blame on the driver, not the browser.
Without bugs in the driver, even bad behaviour from the browser shouldn't bring the whole machine down.
Graphics drivers are sadly famously buggy, and occasionally the hardware is buggy too, and the driver needs to work around those bugs in the hardware, and occasionally the users hardware specifically is broken in some way, and then there's no winning.
It's probably true that Firefox has less workarounds for buggy drivers hardcoded into it than Chromium, but in the end the blame is on the driver, and if they had blacklisted your driver the likely "improvement" is you'd no longer have any hardware accelleration, which is not exactly a great result - the real fix needs to be better drivers that don't crash the system for no good reason.
Firefox is my main and only GUI browser on Debian. I use to daily and it's up/on constantly. Even with nightly builds, I haven't had Firefox crash let alone crash the entire computer. I don't view very many resource intensive sites or SPAs trying be desktop apps. The worst performance I get is usually Slack in a tab. Hasn't crashed though.
Same here. Worst thing that's happened is when it refuses to load a site until I restart it after a background update, which kinda kills my flow for a second, but at least it restores the session immediately. I have noticed something on some of the more sketchy sites in which resource usage spikes, which I am guessing is some new abuse of workers or something. The uneducated conspiracy theorist in me assumes some magic crypto mining background thing that uBlock hasn't identified yet, but I haven't been bothered to investigate since it's rare and brief.
Same here. Rock solid on FreeBSD for weeks on end (I don't go longer without rebooting). I don't think it ever crashed. And FreeBSD isn't even an officially supported platform for FF.
And no problems with websites either. I don't even have Chrome or any chromium based browser installed.
Firefox uses hardware acceleration for page rendering (WebRender), WebGL, and video decoding. You can try switching to Firefox’s software implementation of each of those feature to see if that avoids the crashes.
To use software WebRender, set about:config pref “gfx.webrender.software” = true. To use software WebGL, set "widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled" = false. To use software video decoding, set "media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled" = false.
If those settings do avoid the crashes, please file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information. Perhaps there is a GPU driver bug that Firefox needs to work around.
This is exactly what I last week and this seems to have fixed the issue. But the point still stands, I don't expect my mom who uses Ubuntu to do these things.
I'm glad you found a workaround. Do you know which setting change fixed the issue?
If file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information, Firefox developers can work around the buggy GPU driver so other users don't experience the driver crash.
Just gonna add on to the pile of replies: I've got hardware-accelerated Firefox set up as well, and have zero issues with crashing. Can't remember the last time it crashed. Even going months back.
(And one of the PCs it's on runs a GT 710 with now outdated drivers)
I thought hardware acceleration is not even turned on by default yet on Linux? That said, I've been running hardware accelerated firefox for several years on 3 different computers with different graphics cards, what hardware are you using? Have you reported a bug?
It is essentially impossible for user-space applications to crash Linux. This is a property of Linux itself. A user-space application can call into the kernel through very focused API layers, which in turn calls hardware drivers. Those can crash Linux. It is almost guaranteed it is a driver problem.
Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed.
They can't live without the money from their worst competitor.
I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago.
So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.
> Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed.
That's not at all what happened. Source?
> They can't live without the money from their worst competitor.
Probably true. We could switch to a different search engine (again), but I'd imagine it wouldn't be pretty.
> I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago.
False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. I'll just say that in my daily experience, it's very very hard to detect any "evil Google overlord influence".
> So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.
... I think you might be reading too much into specific complaints. I agree that you can construct a narrative out of a bunch of events that makes Mozilla look bad.
Or, you know, you could construct a different narrative.
I guess people are drawn to what they want to believe.
So this is not true, and it is all lies? [0] So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it?
Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding?
> False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt.
It is true. Don't bother denying or arguing it because everyone knows it's true. [2] Even from the title in 2007:
> "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says"
> "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago.
They know that they cannot live without Google's money and call itself 'independent' or 'privacy-first'. There is no significant revenue source other than Google is there?
> So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it?
Ah, so that's the operative definition of privacy you're using. Yes, Mozilla sends people to Google's search engine, and that search engine is at least capable of tracking users (and many Google properties definitely are tracking users, intensively.)
But if you visit www.google.com with any browser, the same thing happens.
Yes, it would be better for privacy to default to DuckDuckGo, for example. (That's what my browser is set to.) Mozilla could switch to DDG as its default, but then it would be paid far less and would not be able to support anywhere close to the current level of development. Or they could continue to take Google's money to compete with Google. If Google is secretly in full control of Firefox's direction, then that would be better. But given my personal experience, that is nowhere even close to being the case, and so it's better that Firefox survives.
> Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding?
Mozilla is working hard on privacy. If having google.com as the default search engine invalidates that in your mind, then I have no argument to give.
> > "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
> I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago.
If that's what it takes to stay independent. Mozilla is independent. Therefore, no need to walk away.
It's not a comfortable independence, and Mozilla is actively working on diversifying revenue. I'm sure they could be doing better. I'm not sure random internet commenters could do better, no matter their level of confidence.
Taking Google's money is not identical to being "an arm of Google", as Baker put it in that article you quoted. I guess that's the fundamental disagreement here?
I agree, but when you say last remaining, were there ever any other contenders in the “mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular” category?
Konqueror (ancestor of WebKit) is the closest I can think of.
"We already have HTML". Yes, but with Gemini, you know the entire "Geminispace" is going to be like that. It's nice for the state of mind! It also ensures sites on the network won't track you, as the wealth of HTTP headers can kindly assist with.
"We already have Gopher". Yes, but Gemini comes with some very useful, almost essential, additions for broader adoption like mandated TLS encryption and things that should have been solved decades ago like defining character encodings, use of MIME types to define binaries, and well supported links to non-Gopher protocols.
I loved what Opera was. It used to be my main browser, before Firefox. These days though, Firefox wins for various reasons and not being a blink rebrand.
Konqueror now use QtWebEngine by default but iirc correctly can still be used with QtWebKit and KHtml/Kjs. But the both are deprecated and will be dead in Qt6/KDE Framework 6.
It's just not sustainable for a small open source community to build an open source browser engine.
Firefox may be the first love for many of us, but this description is a stretch of reality. And stretching reality for the last 10 years is what may have gotten Firefox in the downward spiral it is in. Time for a wake up call maybe?
Same. And I still wish Mozilla the best even though I'd like less focus on branding and appearances and more on solid work. But they'll do as they can.
I've been using Firefox for a looong time. What convinced me to choose that over any other browser is the following:
A. It ran on macOS AND Solaris (which I worked on for a looong time).
B. It took awhile for the feature to arrive but eventually I was able to sync my bookmarks across both platforms (this made me so happy).
At this point, even though I'm not using Solaris anymore (sniff) I'm so used to it I don't feel the need to try anything else.
I know this is painful to say and to hear, but below 4 percent is not reasonably popular anymore. It doesn’t mean Firefox isn’t a good browser or that you shouldn’t use it. But we shouldn’t pretend it is even semi-popular anymore. (Except among geeks where I think you can reasonably say it is popular.)
Firefox's anti-fingerprinting features are being pulled up directly from Tor, if you seriously want to resist fingerprinting in your normal browsing, you use Firefox. Additionally, Firefox has the best extension support of any browser. Ublock Origin works better in Firefox than it does in Chrome, today. Firefox containers also don't really have a good equivalent in other browsers; they are an incredibly useful tool for easy separation of site data -- and containers are exposed as an API that extensions can take advantage of. That kind of easy access to privacy controls matters because privacy controls have to be simple enough to use that people can actually use them day-to-day and not just once and a while when they're doing something sensitive.
On the developer side of things, Firefox also outperforms Chrome in its CSS developer tools; I use Chrome for debugging Javascript, I usually prefer to debug CSS and prototype layout in Firefox. There are other advantages, Firefox and Chrome kind of go in different directions in what they prioritize for developers.
But the extension support is the big one. Properly configured, Firefox will be more private than any other browser, including stuff like DeGoogled Chromium, because DeGoogled Chromium is still based on Chrome and is still missing the extension APIs that Ublock Origin uses in Firefox, it's still missing the anti-fingerprinting features from Tor.
People can debate a lot of stuff (I like Firefox's resource usage but performance is subjective and user-dependent), and people get mad about Firefox defaults and decisions the company makes (sometimes legitimately, Firefox often makes bad decisions), but just as a private browser, Firefox is objectively more capable today than any other full-featured browser I've ever seen. I don't think that's just my opinion, Firefox objectively has more privacy features and better privacy APIs for extensions.
That would be the problem if 1. firefox only had a _literal_ handful of users (rather than 100s of millions), or 2. if any browser was _that_ good at anti-fingerprinting.
But at the moment which browser you use is nowhere near as powerful in identifying you as the rest of the huge fingerprinting surface available.
Fingerprinting currently gives pretty much everyone a unique fingerprint in almost every browser, so even if only 100 people managed to share a fingerprint, that would already be a big success. Firefoxes relatively low usage share doesn't currently add up to any real significance in the fingerprinting calculus.
A 1% browser (and Firefox is solidly above that) means approximately 6-7 bits of entropy. If Firefox's fingerprinting protection removes at least these many bits, then it's worth using Firefox.
This would only work in isolation, but there are other fingerprintable bits such as the IP address (which you can't hide).
IP address alone is already a very good identifier unless you share it with other people. If you do share it, then user-agent and browser fingerprint becomes the next thing. If other users on the same IP use Safari and you're the only one using Firefox then you are trivial to identify.
> but there are other fingerprintable bits such as the IP address (which you can't hide).
We're (collectively within privacy spaces) working on this. It's one of the reasons why I think the "VPNs are useless" debates are so disingenuous. Tor also has this problem (if you're the only person on your network connecting to Tor, that's a decent signal about things), and nobody argues that Tor is useless.
But I'll refer back to a point I've made a couple of times in the past: if you are in a boat with 5 holes on the bottom, and you want to patch those holes before the boat sinks, there is going to be a point in time where you have 2-3 holes patched and some holes are still leaking.
Figuring out a mass-market way to deal with IP addresses (hopefully using a better method than VPNs) is a real challenge. I'm encouraged by what Apple is doing with its private relay, I'm encouraged by some (not all, but some) of the work going on with P2P connections. But it's a tough problem. We don't want these systems to be opt-in or expensive, and we want to protect people from shady actors that can abuse them (see again, VPNs).
That being said, if the response is that we shouldn't care about fingerprinting because IP addresses are an unsolved problem (even though with significant work, they're not an unsolved problem, VPNs/Wireguard/etc do legitimately help here), it just seems really fatalistic and worthless to me as a perspective. Sites do fingerprinting today, they see value in it. If fingerprinting was worthless and all you needed was an agent and an IP address, sites wouldn't fingerprint; and yet they do. To me that's evidence enough that anti-fingerprinting matters, sites don't just look at the Firefox header and then call it a day and I don't think they would waste their time if the header alone gave them all the information they wanted.
More to the point, I regularly see people argue that we shouldn't be doing anything about IP addresses because fingerprinting exists, it's an extremely common argument about why relays/VPNs/Tor/DoH/ESNI don't matter. So there's a little bit of circular reasoning here; Firefox is pretty much doing the best job at anti-fingerprinting right now, but people don't care because of IP addresses. And then when you talk about IP addresses, people don't care because of fingerprinting. The reality is that you are currently on a boat with multiple holes, it is filling with water, and you need to start patching some of them.
Definitely, 6-7 bits might be enough to identify you. But Chrome allows for plenty of fingerprinting methods of its own. You can't just install add ons that disable the features or feed bogus data. Then you are the one guy who uses fingerprinting. Your only chance is to use software that is at least commonly used, and not enable options that are most of the time disabled.
That is also a good point -- if you are trying to get rid of fingerprinting vectors in Chrome, I vaguely suspect that is going to stick out more than using Firefox.
I don't have hard data to prove that, so I won't make a bold claim about it. But it seems illogical to me to say that you're using Chrome to blend in if you're also customizing Chrome (or using DeGoogled Chromium, Chromium itself, or a ton of extensions) in a way that makes it obvious you're a power user that cares about privacy.
In contrast, in Firefox having Ublock Origin installed is probably a bit more common than in Chrome, and turning on the anti-fingerprinting features standardizes a large percentage of your setup with anyone else who flips that bit in their Firefox settings. You can worry somewhat less that you're doing something that is completely unique with your anti-fingerprinting setup. But again, I would hesitate to make strong claims about that without more data.
Not being run by google is already a _very_ good thing. That said in my experience Firefox is much faster than chrome both on Linux and Android, on top of that I find the extensions available for Firefox much better as well.
It was better having all the extensions in a mobile browser. Like a damn user agent switcher. Firefox is not worse than Chrome by any means, it's just a pathetic shadow of the powerful tool it used to be.
The main financial contributor to Mozilla is Google. So in a way, Firefox is run by Google. Some say it's convenient for Firefox to exist to avoid anti-trust lawsuits.
That's more or less what Microsoft did with Apple for I believe the same basic reason. They invested 150 million in 1997 to keep Apple afloat. Now Apple is worth 3 trillion. It can be turned around.
All browsers have gotten kind of sameish. I don't feel much difference between Edge, Chrome and Firefox (on Windows). A couple minor differences like Edge having native vertical tabs, where I have to go to a more powerful but less performant and less stable extension in Firefox, or Firefox having the sync feature I trust more. But overall it feels hard to find good reasons to use one browser over another. Firefox's multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.
For me, Firefox has a lot of subtle niceties that I miss if I'm using Chrome to test something out.
Firefox has much more efficient browsing keyboard shortcuts (although old Opera was comparably good), / allows you to jump to text where you're typing and you can use ' to search only texts of links, then you can just press return/enter to click links.
Tab management is better. Custom CSS allows multiple rows of tabs at the top and allows you to hide the close tab X's entirely, so you can close tabs only with middle click or double click without having to target (or avoid) a tiny close button. Also keyboard shortcuts CTRL Shift PgUp/PgDn to rearrange tabs which doesn't seem to be present in Chrome. CTRL+Tab as an option to browse tabs in recently used order (leaving CTRL pgup/pgdn for left/right order). Also for whatever reason Chrome doesn't let you mute individual tabs, only muting entire sites, while Firefox lets you mute individual tabs.
Extensions in general on Firefox are a bit more powerful, uBlock Origin on Firefox is a bit more effective at blocking ads than it is on Chrome. On Android Firefox supports uBlock Origin while Chrome has no extensions, but honestly I think every mobile browser is pretty shit (just Firefox slightly less so).
> multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.
And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.
I agree on containers being Firefox's only headline feature. To potentially add to your comparison list, Brave is the only other fully open-source browser other than Firefox. I'm an ex-FF user after 19 years of dedication, and now use Edge, but Brave is my close 2nd choice due to its focus on OSS transparency and privacy. And Brave is the only browser that's Chromium-based, fully open-source, and focuses on privacy. If these things interest someone at least.
Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.