> You can't honestly say that about Firefox nowadays
I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways.
Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load.
I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features.
I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android.
Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that.
But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.
> Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking
The thing is, while things like privacy and adblocking are important, they are passive defensive features made necessary by others; they aren't things that make you feel good, they just make you feel less bad about certain things. When an extension could customize your browser exactly the way you wanted, that was exciting; when TreeStyleTabs felt integrated into the browser, instead of taking several seconds to load and feeling bolted on, it felt like an amazing part of _Firefox_; when mouse gestures worked reliably on every page, including new tab pages and plaintext-mime pages (really, sort this out Mozilla! No reason other than bad coding for extensions to not work on text/plain pages), it felt like a part of the browser, like Firefox was super-charged.
These are the things people can get excited about, and so gets people to show them off to others and recommend it. It's hard to talk about how this nuanced privacy feature is better for X complex reason, in casual conversation; much easier to demonstrate how you're able make the browser fit you like a glove with customizations A, B, and C (and it's more psychologically natural to want to show off positive additive features, too).
> and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support
Extension support, yes, but in terms of actual extensions, it's a yes-and-no situation. The thing about this and other customization that Mozilla doesn't seem to understand is, it's not enough to have "better" extension support, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the difference in popularity between Firefox and Chrome, and hence the difference in availability/motivation of addon developers.
I still use Firefox as my main browser, but the extension support is not "better enough" for me anymore (see issues mentioned in the first para above), and so for the first in time actual decades, after switching from IE6 to Firefox back in the day, I'm considering switching or partially switching to another browser for my daily use (and have been doing so little by little, with Brave and qutebrowser).
I guess I need to start advocating for this more, because people genuinely don't seem to know: Firefox is, today, straight-up better than Chrome on privacy in user-visible ways; albeit maybe not immediately obvious ways.
Just off the top of my head, Ublock Origin on Chrome doesn't reliably start up when the browser starts up. If you have a page set as your homepage on Chrome, it might get loaded with ads on it even if you have Ublock Origin installed, because Chrome doesn't supply a mechanism for them to defer requests until after extensions load.
I've seen people argue that they'll switch back to Firefox after Manifest V3 is required, but Ublock Origin already works better in Firefox than Chrome (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...).
I don't know if that counts as visible though, because I see people who argue that even Safari's adblocking is "good enough". Maybe stuff like blocking ads just isn't obvious enough? Certainly all of the privacy improvements in Firefox (and I'll make the same claim, Firefox is just straight-up better than Chrome on a technical level where privacy is concerned) -- but those privacy features are not visible to even technical users, even people on HN don't notice those features.
I would think that being one of the only big browsers on mobile that has good adblocking would be enough of a selling point that almost everyone on HN with an Android phone would be running Firefox on that at least, to me that's a user-visible feature. But I know a lot of technical people who still use Chrome on Android, and I've run into people who straight-up don't know that Firefox supports adblocking on Android.
Informal poll, how many people here with an Android device are currently running Chrome on it, even though Chrome doesn't block ads on Android? If that number is high among technical users, then either adblocking doesn't count as user-visible, or people just don't know? I'm not sure what to make of that.
But I want to push back against this narrative a little bit that Firefox just doesn't have anything going for it anymore. Firefox is indisputably the best mainstream browser available available today outside of Tor for privacy, adblocking, and (even with the decline of functionality) extension support. I'm just not sure that stuff matters for market share; or maybe the gap isn't wide enough that people care.