Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for!
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page
So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).
Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
Yeah "donations" is not the right word, it's more like "sponsorship"... It does work though, I haven't heard of CubeSoft before I used Floorp and I have one of its PDF tools installed now. This is how advertising should work, not the tracking ads Mozilla (and idc if they're trying to make it "privacy-preserving" or the data aggregated, it's still tracking), Google, and co. want
I take your point, but it is worth noting that gifts, services, and goods are often exchanged for money and termed "donations" when the dollar amount greatly exceeds what one would normally pay, with the understanding that the proceeds go to a certain cause/group/organization.
Our local grocery duopoly (Australia) not only charge for placement, but are now demanding that suppliers pay for transport between the supermarkets central and regional distribution warehouses, but will only take delivery centrally.
That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience.
I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.
100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!) has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping, split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing some new features.
Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.
The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.
Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.
> The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.
This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000 "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source either.
TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks are much better suited to try out new concepts, which eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).
> They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart.
> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.
Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
Getting people to pay for something that has always been free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a browser is. They just think it’s part of the OS.
Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the world who uses the free service to be willing to pay, just enough of them to fund your project.
There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)
However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox
This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.
I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...
> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.
"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox."
For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea.
Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary.
Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia.
I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.
I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.
Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover.
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.
It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.
Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).
The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
In Firefox, you can choose a local html file as your home page, but not as a new tab page. This is allegedly because of some security concerns. Using extentions allows for a limited workaround where the page needs to be re-imported each time it is edited.
The surprising part to me is that the same applies to the forks too.
If opening a local file for the home page not a security concern, why should it be for the new tab page. I understand that giving local files access to extensions could lead to issues, however, it should not need an extension to use a local file as a new tab page.
Note: I maintain my bookmarks in a local html file, which I make into my home page, new tab page, across browsers, and then sync this file across devices using Syncthing.
> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive.
Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website?
IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…
FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not seeing any concrete information about how it's different from upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it shouldn't require much work?
well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with.
The problem with Firefox forks I have:
- you don't know when they are gonna keel over and die.
- non-existent support from distro package repositories. Void Linux for example has an understandable policy of not providing Firefox and Chromium forks. I really don't wanna install them from appimages or fatpak.
I have found using firefox provided by my distro with something like arkenfox to be a decent medium but it sucks that this is required in the first place. I wonder if distro repository maintainers try to package Firefox with better defaults but I don't know how to look for that.
That, and in many cases they get "stuck" at the firefox version they are based on which means that newer things might not work and more importantly security fixes might not be applied.
I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following:
- no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off)
- timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer)
- login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox)
- WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
Unchecking resistFingerprinting in the settings disables these. You can also use the new firefox FPP settings to enable most if RFP stuff but opt out of specific stuff like dark mode, timezone, etc. You can even add per-site exceptions.
I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it just works!
Unironically tho when were the last time you see people trying random doors if they are unlocked. There is absolutely no need to lock your door if you are not vocal about it.
That kind of thinking (neglecting a broken lock on the back door, because I figured chances were low that someone would take advantage) got my apartment "broken" in to a few years ago.
Are you not using librewold-overrides.cfg to disable/enable features that you want/need? All of the things you mentioned are just flags you can set in the file to turn them on or off.
https://librewolf.net/docs/settings/
Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer you networking disabled by default but the ability to enable completely unrestricted networking in the settings (you can install a plugin for CORS and the like if you want) or to natively provide the privacy controls you need to actually use the browser? If the latter, why is it different depending which attack surface you ask about? If the former, why not just make that plugin part of the browser itself?
> Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer you networking disabled by default
Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network requests" should be the default idle state of the browser until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)
I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And let's be honest here, a very significant majority of websites does not need WebGL.)
I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every time.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
Can definitely attest to this. Librewolf is my daily and I run it pretty aggressively (uBO options/lists, strict blocking DNS, etc) and sometimes I'm left scratching my head where things break. Recently had an aha-moment that felt triumphant when disabling the limit cross-origin referers, as silly as it sounds. Alas, I guess I prefer it this way.
I also ran into this, but it was manageable (after a bit of research of course).
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
I'm not convinced that "trusting the browser about the timezone it says it's in" is a dark pattern when it's done in service of scheduling meetings that the user directly requested.
Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.
As someone responsible for login/registration at a large online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks. Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-login with credentials from password dumps, try to register accounts controlled by bots.
Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.
If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.
I found on 136.0.0-ish that some settings persist despite checking/unchecking that box and restarting LibreWolf, but YMMV. I also manually inspect 'about:config' and search there for relevant settings (like 'fingerprint'). For fingerprinting, browser breakage is unlikely so toggling these hidden flags is easy.
Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find out how. Too opinionated.
The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized derivatives" or "spin-offs"?
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
I've been using zen lately mostly for the combination of "essentials" + "workspace" tab management scheme. I love having a space for tabs while also having a spot to pin stuff like email and bluesky which doesn't necessarily fit into one category or other.
Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery which was good but not quite there for me.
These are arc features (which were copied/ported to zen) and are the main reason I use ARC atm on my Mac. On PC I use zen because arc sucks on PC. It's hard to lose these features imo.
I am a bit confused by their moving from C++ to Swift instead of Rust. It sounds a bit Apple-first. I get that it ports to Linux okay, but will it be hard to make it work with Windows some day?
Rust makes more sense if you were to start from scratch, but the Ladybird devs said that their code is already heavily OOP, so it maps to Swift a lot better.
Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish they'd make an actual browser around it too).
If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for $20/year) to help support the project without giving away personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development; however, having this option would provide people with the choice to support the project without giving up personal data, and Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.
The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine the very purpose of standardization.
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died, because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and without a business model implementing them has been seen historically as overly expensive.
In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.
If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But, alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing ad blockers).
Whoa, slow down there. You can't just go around asking people to read first-party sources and think critically on their own about an issue without getting their opinion from their feed or influencer of choice. That's an unreasonable and insane expectation! /s
The first-party source is Mozilla themselves skirting around saying, but very heavily implying they are now selling unspecified data about me to unspecified actors, in a legally binding way, then walking it back with a pinky promise that is not legally binding, so doesn't actually mean anything.
The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink, would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?
The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.
Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.
What's the alternative? Threatening Gecko developers or contributors into quitting their work on Gecko and demanding they work on Blink or WebKit instead?
Some of us passionately hate Google and Apple for their unethical business practices and would rather cease OSS contributions altogether than contribute to these tyrants.
> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page—but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored" label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to find any information about the project governance or legal structure of Ablaze.
So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?
It's not the exact same revenue model. Floorp doesn't use tracking whatsoever for sponsored ads in the home page. And donations to Floorp directly goes to development, unlike in Mozilla.
I think the issue is that the donations Mozilla receive don't go to Firefox's development. This is not the case with Floorp, Ladybird and Pale Moon where donations and sponsorship money (PM used to accept sponsors but they don't now) do go to development.
There's an article about insecurities in Firefox (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like Ungoogled Chromium.
Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.
I do toggle off all the telemetry settings I can find. But you're talking as if there's a browser company that doesn't do that, or at least less than Mozilla, so can you suggest any of those?
This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries. How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.
Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are doing, except via donations.
Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
"Mozilla spends $200M on it per year" does not mean it costs $200M per year. Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else, it's not a stretch to think they might be overspending on this too.
IMO no real need for anything but Firefox Beta and Nightly now. A bit faster, faster features. Finally, native vertical tabs. Fully functioning Ublock origin. Browsing life is good.
If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo, and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.
Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)
Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.
If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.
I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D
JK. But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think it affects performance at all.
The privacy invasion I need to look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as well.
It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure, open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on Linux soon.
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the issues right now is that there are people who have intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact, it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which was never an intent those power users had in mind: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-s...
I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf. It even seems to be faster.
I also switched from Firefox to LibreWolf, both on Linux and on macOS. I'll likely use the latest Chrome just for banking and other high security tasks, but for my normal browsing LibreWolf seems to work fine.
Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the social destinations on the web.
You can’t get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source volunteer driven projects to keep up.
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared to do without the wonderful services and contents that are "offered" by big corps "for free".
Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds.
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
The problem is that the difficult not only increases with time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop and maintain a new engine.
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for years and years?
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
Exactly, the situation with Chrome is the exact same sort of benevolent dictator problem we had with Internet Explorer, except this time dressed up with an open source license.
Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages (among other things).
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I added that the interests of Google and Microsoft coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of Microsoft.
I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.
They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.
IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.
Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.
> Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together.
Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.
That said,
> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.
Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others.
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).
Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
It’s not tax deductible, though (and even if you didn’t get anything in return, I don’t think Floorp is a registred charity anyway).
Made me realize I never deduced all the open source project i gave to tho.
That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.
I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still better than what chrome or edge offer.
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.
Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.
Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.
Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.
This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
https://zen-browser.app/
> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.
There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)
However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.
I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...
> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
The surprising part to me is that the same applies to the forks too.
If opening a local file for the home page not a security concern, why should it be for the new tab page. I understand that giving local files access to extensions could lead to issues, however, it should not need an extension to use a local file as a new tab page.
Note: I maintain my bookmarks in a local html file, which I make into my home page, new tab page, across browsers, and then sync this file across devices using Syncthing.
the ONLY webkit based zero telemetry browser is Kagis Orion
Why would you think that? Plenty of other forks like LibreWolf and IronFox have removed all telemetry.
IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…
And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.
I have found using firefox provided by my distro with something like arkenfox to be a decent medium but it sucks that this is required in the first place. I wonder if distro repository maintainers try to package Firefox with better defaults but I don't know how to look for that.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
For example, my config is at https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-flake/src/branch/mast...
It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.
Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.
The default should be privacy if you install a browser that focuses on privacy.
Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network requests" should be the default idle state of the browser until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)
I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And let's be honest here, a very significant majority of websites does not need WebGL.)
It’s a position, not a fetish.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage application.
the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in: user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);
I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking anything, but instead as,
"LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against broken, dark-pattern websites"
Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.
If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery which was good but not quite there for me.
From a quick search, it seems that you need to make edits in `about:config` to enable tab groups and use nightly to access vertical tabs.
Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish they'd make an actual browser around it too).
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.
Have you read the first-party sources?
The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.
Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.
If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future implementors can make different tradeoffs.
Some of us passionately hate Google and Apple for their unethical business practices and would rather cease OSS contributions altogether than contribute to these tyrants.
So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?
There are a ton of people who complain about Mozilla taking donations. It shows up in most HN threads about the mismanagement of Firefox.
Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
endless possibilities.....
Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.
It's rough around the edges sometimes, but the quality of life features are chef's kiss:
<Ctrl + Shift + C> to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).
If you're using Firefox from nixpkgs this is already disabled by default[2].
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/appli...
Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
They are maintained for a very long time.
Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)
Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.
If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.
Also Waterfox on the surveillance phone. Seems AOK so far.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the issues right now is that there are people who have intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact, it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which was never an intent those power users had in mind: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-s...
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
We need a hero.
We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared to do without the wonderful services and contents that are "offered" by big corps "for free".
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.
Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.
Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.
That said,
> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
This is not true
Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps)
Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks
Bing vs Google Search
...?