I have been planning to write this post for some time now (from the moment when Theo started a thread about bad gradients in Firefox), but now Mozilla decided to shoot their foot with a nail gun, and Chrome finally implemented the Manifest V3 thingy. But don’t worry: I made sure that everyone on the internet already spoke about the situation, so my post is as irrelevant as possible.

At first, a quick note about Mozilla oopsie: it should be fixed. Firefox is popular not for stealing user data, but because of freedom. A “U” turn in the middle of a road won’t help FF gather a new audience, but it will definitely “help” loose the existing one.

To understand why Firefox is important, we should look at its direct competitor: Chrome (or should I say Chromium). As a piece of technology, Chromium is a marvel. What frightens me, is Googles fingers on a Chromium throat. Check this out:

• Google single-handedly disabled synchronization between Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, effectively forcing you to Chrome. As usual, it was done purely because of “security” and “safety” reasons.
• Implemented non-standard Custom Elements v0 proposal, built a framework on top of it, and migrated the largest video platform to it. This might not be related to Google leadership, but it looked very “pushy” at best. At worst, it looked like an attempt to enforce in-house tooling to everyone.
• Dumbed down Ad Blockers as part of Manifest v3.
• Web Environment Integrity. I almost forgot that this one exited, but it did. Fully-fledged DRM in the name of “hey, you no longer need to enter any captchas because we specifically sign your every request to watch boobs on the internet”.

I’m not mentioning anything about Google’s wrongdoings regarding the web itself (looking at you, AMP), but I have a strong opinion that Google will exploit Chrome’s dominance the very moment they can get away with it. You might think that a regular user won’t lose anything from Google turning the whole web into a chrome platted garden, but look no further than Slack of T*ams. Those don’t support calls in non-chromium based browsers, and not because Firefox can’t do it (even Google’s Meet supports Firefox), but because slapping a “Please download Chrome” banner is much easier and cheaper than fixing issues. And in the end, it is you, the user, who will have to adapt to the proprietary web that Google creates.

OK, so what about other browsers? How exactly different are they? Well, usually they are repacked chromium (or Firefox, but this is much rarer) with some kind of revolutionary AI, built-in AdBlock, or ｡ 🎀 𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓉𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝓉𝒶𝒷 𝒷𝒶𝓇 🎀 ｡. Yeah, I’m not considering them “different”, they are just derivatives with some cosmetic changes on top.

Ladybird, on the other hand, is an entirely new browser (built from existing components, but we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, aren’t we?). Ladybird is still quite young, and it shows (e.g., pages that crash the whole browser). But this is expected: an entirely new browser is not an easy task to do, and even current progress is impressive. I with the team all the luck because fresh blood in the browser industry is what the industry needs now.

As for myself, I use Firefox on all my devices, even on mobile, and I have good reasons:

• Existing sync between mobile and “big” browser.
• Extensions on mobile like uBlock origin and dark reader. Ad Block on mobile browser is spectacular.
• PDF editor (I used it to quickly fill my tax form, in the moment of need. And it is perfect for this purpose).
• I use arch, btw; thus, I’m obligated by the High Council of Arch Linux Users to use Firefox or its derivative.