Comment by agile-gift0262 2 days ago
I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.
Firefox is great on Mac too.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
I tried to use Orion as my daily driver on Mac OS (instead of Firefox) but I couldn't get the simplelogin extension to work (it wouldn't authenticate to my account). Also, it was slower than FF (I know, everything says that it is super fast, but that wasn't my experience).
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.
Can you still get real Firefox on mac? I thought they forced chromium on there now too? The only time I got MacBook I put linux on it within a few months.
So a couple of things.
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
macOS isn't locked down like iOS. There are things like SIP which prevent some hacking/customising of the system, but:
1. These can all be disabled by advanced users (largely without consequence)
2. They dont prevent things like installing apps or even gaining root access in the first place.
The very fact that you can install Linux is evidence of the different approach taken with macs (you can't easily install Linux of ios devices)
The last macbook I owned had an Ethernet port, so I wasn't sure how much had changed in the interim. I knew that had added some lockdown and I wasn't sure how much. That seems like a reasonable compromise.
> I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox
I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).
Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.
They just don’t know. If you show them internet without ads they are amazed that something like that is possible.
That might be true for normal users, but there are many developers who still use Chrome or its derivates in 2025. What excuse do they have?
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that). Personally, I haven't had to resort to a non-Firefox browser or user agent spoof even once in well over a year now.
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I definitely run into pages broken in firefox desktop or especially firefox mobile. Extra especially on proofs of concept advertised here on HN.
Sometimes devs rely on Chrome specific quirks, or are shipping broken apps that Chrome manages to make the correct guesses for it to be functional.
Many see 'it works on Chrome and mobile Safari' as 'it works' and they can get project signoff / ship / get paid / whatever and don't care about other users
The company that has the application may not know until a few users complain (if they complain) and by that point it could be too late due to the contract, or they may not understand what a different browser is or care either.
What do you propose then? Be a browser accelerationist, let Google do whatever the hell they want on your computer, and hope for big daddy government to tell them to stop?
Google is already doing what the hell they want on the vast majority of people's computers. (As are Apple and Microsoft)
Sure, go ahead and install Firefox, LineageOS, etc. (I did so too and am a happy user of both). But I'm just saying that this is not fighting the monopoly in any way, it's just retreating into a bubble where we can ignore it for a while.
I have no answers as to what to do instead, but I think acknowledging that a strategy has failed would be a useful first step.
Yeah I'm surprised Google isn't imposing the same policies on Firefox. They ought to have considerable influence on Mozilla.
They do. They are just more underhanded about it, but no worries, the effect will be the same.
Multi-account containers are brilliant. I recommend the following extensions:
* uBlock Origin
* Privacy Badger
* Multi-Account Containers
* Flagfox
* Cookie AutodeleteI also love Multi-Account containers, but the UI is a bit of a mess. I get annoyed each time I have to futz with it.
If you choose Firefox, you can take advantage of the security vetting extensions must go through to become one of their recommended extensions.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
> I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier
Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.
For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.
The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.
This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.
Here's the ones I hit and reported: ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail.
First, they are color coded / icon specific tabs, not full windows like chrome. I have used it a lot in the past when I'm doing sso testing at work, or logging into 5 or 6 different AWS accounts at the same time. It's really nice to jump from the green tab (Dev) to the red tab (prod) to check some settings or logs. They feel a lot lighter then full on chrome profiles. You can also tie each to specific proxy profiles, so in my last setup we used ssh tunnels to access different environments, so each container connected to different ssh tunnels.
The main thing holding me back is lack of pwa support, since there are a few apps that i need to use that only exist as progressive web apps on Linux. And using another browser for pwa has shown to be a bit cumbersome.
I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.
Mozilla is more questionable than Google? By using Brave you're still staying within the Google ecosystem, sending them the signal that their Chromium internet is the better one.
I swear - people have such a hard on for hating Mozilla because it fails to live up to an impossibly high standard, while giving all the other corporations doing actual harm a free pass.
The Mozilla foundation is overtly political. The fact that they also support a browser is secondary.
I'll bite - if you dont use Firefox because of "questionable ethics", then I am quite surprised you decided to use Brave, considering their controversies. Also Brave is still based on Chrome's engine, and I dont think they'll be able to maintain their fork long-term, so if the reason to switch was to break the Chrome monopoly, then I'm not sure this switch really counts.
I'm sure Eich has political opinions, but he doesn't use the Brave blog to push them and he doesn't impose them on his contractors or customers in the way Mozilla does.
The only time I've used anything but firefox for the last. Well probably since netscape honestly? I am so old. Is to get the in flight entertainment to work on american, but firefox has worked for that for a few years now. People say chrome is faster and in the early 2000s I might have agreed, but now I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox. It is great.