Comment by phendrenad2

I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.

Firefox has multiple, user-affecting, memory leaks related to Youtube (unconfirmed if just youtube), going back at least 7 years. Tab scrollbar as no option to be disabled, so I had to write CSS to get tabs into a form close to what I would like similar to chrome. Tab mute icon has no (working) option to disable the click event, so I had to write CSS to remove it.

I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.

Me too. On mac, FF and chrome basically look and feel identical. Only devtools are quite different.

The stuff INSIDE the viewport is pretty much the same across them all, but on the daily it makes a big difference how your other services integrate with the browser. Someone who is all-in with iCloud, macOS, iOS etc might find it annoying to use Firefox without their personal info like password and credit cards and bookmarks. And the same would be true I guess for Google fans switching to Safari and not having those things.

Though his brave is a relatively small company, they have enough resources to have developed, and continue maintaining their own low-level ad blocker, which IME has been just as effective as uBO, but is supposedly more efficient (since it's written in the R-word language and compiled into native code integrating deeply inside the browser):

I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

> I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers.

Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.

Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):

Chrome: 1300

Firefox: 500

Safari: 100-150

Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)

Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.

The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as useful to spread it about the future. "Don't use product X, the company that owns it could make it unusable someday". Part of me thinks Google keeps threatening to disable adblocking (but never actually does it) as part of a grand strategy. But part of me thinks it's just a coincidence that Google isn't capable of pulling off such a tricky psychological operation.

MV3 was FUD. But what's interesting is how FUD spreads. There were some people who identified that MV3 severely limits adblockers. That's true. There were some people who had an agenda who exaggerated the effects of those limits, making it seem like ad blocking would not work in MV3. Then there were people who read those articles, and believed them without question. There are a lot of them commenting on every thread about browsers.

I suggested that MV3 would be a big nothing from the beginning. And people on HN argued with me every step of the way (mostly people in the latter category who refused to do even the slightest bit of research or verify that the people who they were parroting were actually reliable reporters of anything at all).

Now that MV3 is here, we can see this. MV3 is here. MV2 is gone. And ad blocking still works.

I just installed Google Chrome, clicked on some YouTube videos, and verified that I was getting ads. Then I installed Ublock Origin Lite, and the ads disappeared. I no longer get display ads or video ads on any website.

Now, if you want to bring up some edge case or something, be my guest. But for 99% of even ad block users, strictly speaking, blocking ads is more than enough.