I know that I'm in a bit of a bubble with this one, but I am surprised there is still anyone using Chrome instead of Brave. I get the dependency on Gmail other Google-specific tools, but the built-in ad blocking and Google-free aspects of it made me switch instantly and haven't look back after years.
Chrome has stayed incredibly sketchy from the beginning, when Google gained marketshare by sneaking Chrome into the installer for other products that people intentionally downloaded.
Then Chrome did things like "accidentally" uploading your entire browsing history to Google servers when you signed into Gmail.
Now they have declared war on ad blockers, despite the government warning that ad networks are too big a malware vector to ignore.
All they did was add their own affiliate link to crypto links that didn't have them. You didn't get tracked from it, and you didn't lose out on anything.
Still sketchy because of the lack of consent, but people act like Brave personally stole money from them.
The other "sketchy crypto stuff" is one of the few actually workable alternatives to funding websites with ads on webpages. Again, Brave took in no money (BAT) that you as an admin / creator would have otherwise had, and they keep it in escrow, they don't claim it.
The only other sketchy thing I can remember is pre-installing a deactivated VPN so that people could pay, push a button and it'd work immediately. Plenty of companies do hacks like that for the sake of UX. Dropbox used to hack macOS its Accessibility permission so people wouldn't have to dive into settings to toggle certain things.
The irony is that Firefox has had their own scandals like surreptitiously installing a hidden ad extension that would advertise for Mr. Robot, but somehow Firefox stans have erased that kerfuffle from their collective memory.
> The irony is that Firefox has had their own scandals like surreptitiously installing a hidden ad extension that would advertise for Mr. Robot, but somehow Firefox stans have erased that kerfuffle from their collective memory.
Brave is my default browser for non-sensitive tasks; e.g. most web browsing, GitHub, news, etc.
The built-in ad-blocker & tracker blocker alone is worth it.
Use chrome for testing.
Stock Firefox for anything sensitive.
In my mind, no browser is perfect. However, as far as I can tell that’s not nearly as sketchy as the title implies. It’s for local debugging.
Zen has other issues for me on Ubuntu (eating a ton of resources) which is why I usually use FF. But I put Zen in a different category from Brave and definitely better than Chrome.
I switched to Firefox when Chrome started messing with the ad blockers. Haven't really had any issues. I prefer developer tools on Chrome but I rarely need to use them anyway.
The trouble is that Mozilla has admitted they can't survive without Google's revenue. You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine of they get blocked by Cloudflare for not having enough fingerprinting tech.
(Ungoogled) Chromium and Firefox are both projects that are open source and readily available. The code is sitting there ready for you to compile. More users = more donations. You can be the change you wanna see.
> You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine
This conclusion doesn't follow your premise. Google has to pay because if Mozilla dies, so does the claim of any real competition on the browser engine market. So everyone agrees Firefox's engine is truly independent. Google pays so Firefox users don't use anything that has to do with Google.
If you think about it, the only real way to not hurt Google is for Firefox to stop existing. Chrome would end up being spun off from Google.
I don't agree that you are using Google by proxy when Firefox has more technical independence from Google than Chrome and can be quickly decoupled from the few Google defaults it has, search and safe browsing.
What browser can genuinely claim independence from Google? Chromium browsers are all arguably in the same camp. If FF is implicated, then so are forks like Zen.
Because some things only work in Chrome. It's a fact. It's terrible.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
Chrome likes to make up new "standards" and then some websites adopt them immediately.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
Citation needed. I've seen the opposite--unless there's a very specific niche that can't be otherwise solved, there's huge internal resistance to going it alone.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
Citation of what exactly? That not all browsers implement the same thing at the same time and that some features are Chrome-exclusive because for one reason or another other browsers refuse to implement it?
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
In the past there were features that didn't work at all; I used to hit those regularly. Device setup flows, AV features, etc. These days, it's never "this doesn't work on other browsers". It's always "this is worse on other browsers", whether because they don't test it or because they don't care.
YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.
A lot of IT now curates the extensions for the browsers and doesn't allow extensions not on the whitelist and then they basically just only do that work on Chrome and disable Firefox. It's kinda self defeating in the long run imo but that's the problem in the industry.
I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).
ups.com is one that really infuriates me. It shows 404s for me on Firefox and works perfectly on Chrome.
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
95% of people who use Chrome have no clue what browser they are using.
They got Chrome when it was bundled with every single installer ever for about a decade (which was so prolific and scummy that Microsoft had to make the "default app" picker system more defensive, because Chrome was abusing it more than microsoft apps were).
When you installed Java, you also got Chrome set as your default browser with no interaction.
Or they one click downloaded it from Google.com because of a giant banner saying "You gotta download chrome"
It's insane to me how rarely people on HN seem to actually know the history of this. Everyone who worked in tech support in the 2010s experienced this.
It was an identical strategy that most spyware and adware used at the time.
Not everyone has a well paying tech job. Many have to use their devices until they literally die and many more choose to do so because getting a newer device would mean having to deal with the bullshit of newer software.
I've just 'upgraded' a friend who was using a ThinkPad T410, released Jan 2010. So sixteen years. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it except it was capped at 8GB RAM and chugged along slowly.
Oh yeah, I know "the average person" still thinks Chrome is the best browser (if they even care at all about what browser they use), but I mean in tech circles is where it surprises me...
1. Because it's most popular. Guaranteed support and "monkey see monkey do".
2. The adblocking is preconfigured, and non technical users trying to find the right extensions has a very bad history of unintentional malware. Ad block? Adblock plus? Ublock? Ublock origin? This is a great example of what floors a lot of technical folk who would be "why not just install ublock origin" and fail to understand the "why should I when I can just get Brave one and it works"
If you're anti-Google, use Firefox. It's hypocritical to use the browser they're paying to build, then complain about how they generate revenue to fund it.
After years of using alternative to chrome (Firefox, Chromium, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, etc ...) I have stopped fighting the choice of IT for installing and setting Chrome as the default browser on a Mac. I still use Firefox when I can and religiously reroute URLs to it where possible, but this is beating me down and I would rather spend time playing with LLMs rather than continue this struggle.
I use thorium, which also belongs to the empire, so it is not really any different to Brave - but I can use ublock origin still, so that's better. I think we are all in the Google empire here. Praising Brave as alternative, simply does not make a whole lot of sense really.
Firefox is a bit outside of it but it basically got rid of most of its users. When I use firefox, I can not play audio on youtube videos. It works fine with thorium. I tried to convince the firefox developer who said everyone on Linux must use pulseaudio (I don't) but there is no reasoning with Mozilla hackers here. He thinks he knows better than everyone else does. (I could recompile firefox from source, but Mozilla uses mozconfig still: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox... - they are too incompetent to transition into meson or cmake. A failing project, no wonder it lost most of its users. Titanic got nothing on the Firefox team.)
Brave’s owner is a very sketchy dude. With all the news that were happening around brave, all the shitcoin stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if the browser is mining crypto.
The single affiliated link scandal is enough to not touch that project with a ten foot pole.
I was using Firefox, Vivaldi, Zen, and finally got fed up with various issues that Zen was having, so I switched to Waterfox. I am very happy and the browser is very fast; difference is immense.
To each their own, but I've been using Brave for a long time (5+ years I think?). It was one or 2 clicks to turn off the crypto stuff when I first installed it. It was straightforward and no dark patterns were employed. It has never come back, unlike what Google and Firefox tend to do with their annoying features. It even syncs my preferences to any new browser I add so I only had to do it on one computer once and never worry about it again.
The web's dependency on Chromium engines is deeply concerning, I agree. I used Firefox for a long time. But at this point, IMO Brave is the most pragmatic choice if you want a browser that's not Google but "just works" with the modern web.
Vivaldi just works without annoying crypto and most importantly provides lot of customization, brave feels like barebone browser next to it, hard to understand why someone stays on such basic browser not allowing any customization (tried both and was shocked how bad is Brave many promote here).
I want to use a browser engine that is not developed/owned by Google, so I use Firefox. I also don't want to support Brave's CEO's politics, so I would not use Brave regardless.
My theory is that, since I'm going to do things like banking in my browser, I want one that has a lot of skin in the game. Chrome being backed by Google has trillions of dollars on the line should they ever do anything truly evil. Though this sneaky 4GB download comes close.
