If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.
It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.
(JS has few good uses, but is too excessive. Less code is always better - and an art.)
(- it's kind of behavior extension on tag level, yet has JS - and it's orthogonal, like CSS or XSLT (BTW. see that hack: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=41245159), unlike JS which is.. untamed and invasive; i.e. there is video (any) tag but you could (+)DIY not touching the document - like custom playing with MPlayer or VLC as a plugin there for all AV formats or sorting filtering editing whatever, all aside custompacks? :)
- or, what about the other way, like a firewall ??
Unusable for the commenter perhaps, based on his choices, but not unusable in an absolute sense
For example, I have been using the web without an adblock for several decades.^1 I see no ads
Adblocking is only necessary when one uses a popular graphical web browser
When I use an HTTP generator and a TCP client then no "adblock" is necessary
When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary
Websites that comprise "the web" are only one half of the ad delivery system
The other half is the client <--- user choice
Firefox is controlled and distribuited by an entity that advocates for a "healthy online advertising ecosystem" and sends search query data to an online advertising services company called Google in exchange for payment. Ex-Mozilla employees left to join Google and start another browser called "Chrome"
These browsers are designed to deliver advertising. That's why an "adblock" extension is needed
When one uses a client that is not controlled and distributed by a company that profits from advertising services, that is not designed to deliver advertising, then an "adblock" may not be needed. I also control DNS and use a local forward proxy
The web is "usable" with such clients. For example, I read all HN submissions using clients that do not deliver or display ads. I am submitting this comment without using a popular graphical web browser
1. Obviously there are some exceptions, e.g., online banking, e-commerce, etc. For me, this is a small minority of web usage
The web is usuable with a variety of clients, not only the ones designed to deliver ads
You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.
Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?
I make HTTP requests with a TCP client
There are no "false positives"
I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.
I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"
There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact
If you’re happy with it, carry on. But you are using the equivalent of an ad blocker.
I even still use the original line mode browser and other utilties in the 1995 w3c-libwww from time to time
The "modern" protocols are handled by the local forward proxy not the client
TLS1.3, HTTP/2, QUIC, etc.
There are some web users who are online 24/7
There are others who may prefer to stay offline
A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes
HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"
As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History
[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...
Now I'm back to Firefox again and nothing has died so far.
whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice.
yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)
These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.
It amazes me that every link the kid's school sends is a tracking link, and not always the same tracker.
And yet somehow most people in the world use it every day without an adblocker...
Yeah but they haven't and they're not going to, so what's the point of fantasizing about what you would do in that situation? It's like tough guy syndrome, where a person constantly fantasizes about what they would do in the imaginary situation where one of their friends or family is disrespected, or doomsday preppers who spend their life imagining what they would do in an apocalypse that never comes.
That stuff belongs on archiveofourown.com, not news.ycombinator.com.
I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
I'm all for fanfiction, but as I noted before, it seems that these days archiveofourown.com is where people publish that stuff, not Hacker News. It's easy to sign up and if your fiction is creative people will give you positive reviews. But you might need to spice it up by implying a conspiracy to cooperate with Google or something.
I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.
Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.
Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time.
I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference
(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.
I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it.
I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue.
But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.
That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.
Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris.
Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains.
Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice.
I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS.
Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.
You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
Meaning they select each other, because they're all on each other's board.
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.
Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.
It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.
Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.
Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.
From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.
It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.
The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.
Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/
Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way.
Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.
How do Mozilla's costs look?
If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.
(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
It may kill the browser in a longer window, but before that, it would make them money. Most users do not donate anyway.
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
... damn do I have adhd?????
(I'm kidding)
I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU
And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.
And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.
A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.
And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.
One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.
I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.
It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!
What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.
How much of that is Firefox rendering being worse vs artificial slowdowns by Google owned sites kind of doesn't matter in the end. Objectively it's a slower browsing experience but I solely use it for uBlock Origin.
For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
The whole desktop market is cratering.
I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.
Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.
So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".
I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so.
I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset.
Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
(Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it.
I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.
> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet
Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""
While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".
But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.