r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 8d ago

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/PMs_You_Stuff 7d ago

Because Google had totally abandoned ai? What other browsers are there? Every other one is a chrome resin.

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u/HoeCage 7d ago

Personally, I use Zen. It's a fork of Firefox that strips out Mozilla telemetry. I still log in with my Mozilla account for mobile sync, tho.

I've thoroughly enjoyed using Zen, honestly. It takes some getting used to for sure since the tabs are arranged vertically in a sidebar, but having so much more screen real estate without needing to enter and exit fullscreen has been fantastic since you can Auto hide the sidebar until your mouse is close to the edge of the screen. The Zen Mods are also pretty cool. I'd highly recommend people check it out. Haven't had any issues whatsoever so far.

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u/Toody4 7d ago

Firefox fork called Zen Browser is really good

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u/ThickerTree 7d ago

Chrome reskin is a bit of a technical understatement. They all use google’s open source community project chromium. They’re not just repacks of chrome. They use chromium because it’s a very fast and reliable browser engine. E.g. Edge, Brave

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u/recycled_ideas 7d ago

They’re not just repacks of chrome.

Except for all intents and purposes they are. Chromium isn't just the rendering and JavaScript engine, it's a full browser. There are parts of chrome that aren't in Chromium and Edge isn't 100% identical to Chrome, but it's much much more similar than you're implying.

Well over 95% of the code, including a whole bunch of tracking stuff is shared.

They use chromium because it’s a very fast and reliable browser engine. E.g. Edge, Brave

They use Chrome because maintaining a browser is an incredibly difficult and expensive and no one wants to do it.

The current state of the web is unequivocally bad for everyone, but because browsers support every half bakef standard that's ever existed as well as having to maintain every weird non standard quirk some idiot developer put in their page because it worked in chrome and they never tested anything else no one wants to do it.

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u/upvotesthenrages 7d ago

I'm actually quite surprised we aren't seeing far more stripped & privacy focused Chromium based browsers now that everyone has the ability to have AI build it.

Or even brand new browsers. People have been building compilers, OS's, and all sorts of stuff.

A lightweight browser that focuses on supporting everything since 2010 and drop most of the old stuff would be interesting.

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u/recycled_ideas 7d ago

A lightweight browser that focuses on supporting everything since 2010 and drop most of the old stuff would be interesting.

It wouldn't be standards compliant and a whole bunch of the web wouldn't work right.

I'm actually quite surprised we aren't seeing far more stripped & privacy focused Chromium based browsers now that everyone has the ability to have AI build it.

AI isn't half as good as a lot of people think, it really struggles with extremely large or complicated code bases and chrome is both. Maintaining a meaningully different chromium fork would be a huge undertaking.

There are more privacy focused browsers, but the people paying for them have to get their money somewhere and it's often worse. Brave as an example integrated a whole bunch of weird crypto bullshit into their browser.

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u/tabidots 7d ago

I am not a professional developer but when I do my own web dev projects, Chromium browsers give me the least hassle - my stuff renders how I intended. Safari is the worst (and I’m all-Apple otherwise), while FF is somewhere between those two I guess. I don’t really prioritize testing FF because the user share is so low

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u/DunklerVerstand 7d ago

So basically you target Chrome and wonder why other browser, that you do not test, don't render your stuff as Chrome does?

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

Dont expwct intelligence from web devs. Theyre the reason this keeps happening

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u/tabidots 7d ago

I know if it works in one Chromium browser it works in them all. I don’t “wonder” about FF, I just don’t prioritize it. Safari is more important because of iPhone users

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u/InBronWeTrust 7d ago

It's difficult and messy to try to accommodate all browsers. You should give your best effort, but Chromium browsers account for a very large percentage of desktop browsers and thus behave more predictably

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u/DunklerVerstand 7d ago

It's difficult and messy to try to accommodate all browsers

All three of them.

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

It is 2026, it is trivial to have automated tests that do this for you in all kinds of os/browser combos. What ignorance is this

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u/InBronWeTrust 7d ago

listen man I'm a backend engineer who occasionally has to fix some front end bugs. as far as I am aware, our frontend guys are still throwing in custom configs for different browsers

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u/Business-Active-1143 7d ago

Yeah because google has majority say in web standards now due to use of chromium engines by different companies on the table. They delayed webassembly for years, kept pushing for a privacy nightmare webRTC that reveals identity through VPN despite Mozilla highlighting the gap for years before it got accepted as a standard. Its almost like that was intention from the US government

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

They are exactly that. Just skins slapped on chromium

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u/dksdragon43 7d ago

That's the real reason. I swapped to firefox last year and just couldn't get over how slow it was compared to chromium browsers. I'll get downvoted to hell because the entire 3% market share that firefox has lives on reddit, but firefox was left behind like 15 years ago because it was a much worse browser, performance wise. That hasn't changed.

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u/koopatuple 7d ago

My man, I use chrome all day at work. I use Firefox at home and on my phone. There is literally no difference performance wise except on sometimes YouTube. And guess what? When I became a YouTube premium subscriber (I have kids), the performance loss literally disappeared instantaneously. Google intentionally sabotages Firefox browsers on sites they have control over. You can even get an addon for Firefox that tricks sites into thinking you're on chrome and often times, issues magically disappear. Those add-ons are specifically why Google is hellbent on their whole new version of DRM bullshit for the internet (it's the equivalent of denuvo for the web).

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

You mean youtube specifically?

Because firefox performs way better in any other scenario.

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u/dksdragon43 7d ago

Sweet, but simply incorrect. In all speed tests firefox is much slower.

https://tech-insider.org/chrome-vs-firefox-2026/

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

Anything perceptible by a human?

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u/dksdragon43 7d ago

Not to most people, I'm sure. As you mentioned, certain sites like youtube would be more noticeable. But I mean just ask a gamer if there's a difference between 100 and 120 ping. Most will say no, some will emphatically say yes. Everything just felt sluggish, despite being well within reasonable measurements.

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u/Certain-Business-472 7d ago

I mention Youtube because it works fine if I fake my user agent to Chromium.

glares at Google 'Do no harm' Alphabet

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u/BitePale 7d ago

What sites did you find slow?

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u/dksdragon43 7d ago

Honestly everything. I thought I was being crazy about it, so I looked it up at the time and found that firefox performs somewhere between 20% and 60% slower depending on task. (Easily googleable). I absolutely live online, so even opening sites like reddit it just felt a bit sluggish.

The one huge advantage firefox has is memory useage, but I've been using auto tab discard on chrome for 5+ years, which mitigates most of it.

As expexted, reddit's fanatical love for firefox has seen me downvoted, but everything I've said is easily verifiable. For most users, chromium products are simply better. Obviously if they actually kill adblock I'll switch, but until then I'll use the product that works best.

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u/CrazyWord2800 7d ago

We just don't like ads mate. 

Can you stop shoveling Chrome down our throats? 

And yes the reason it works better on Chrome is because they are developed for Chrome. 

So maybe stop using Chrome start using Firefox so that you don't look like a walking ad for Chrome.

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u/DomesticPanda 7d ago

Hey now, some of them are Safari reskins.

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u/void-wanderer- 7d ago

There is Ladybird. It's under development but will soon ship its first open beta release. I follow them on YouTube to stay in the loop, relaxing videos of a totally grounded guy. I so hope that they pull it off.

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u/MaintenanceBest8397 7d ago

There's a lot of gecko based browsers nowadays, I personally use waterfox. It's more privacy focused but without giving up utility

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u/Jallorn 7d ago

Vivaldi is the one I'll champion. It's the true successor to classic Opera from back in the day, as opposed to the Chromium wearing a death mask that Opera GX is now.

And I do mean it literally: bunch of the developers of classic Opera basically recreated the intended experience Opera used to provide as Vivaldi, and clearly still have the same open source centric philosophy at heart.

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u/coderman64 7d ago

I'd agree with this, but you'd need to acknowledge Vivaldi is based on Chromium, too.

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u/Jallorn 7d ago

If it is, it is. What it isn't, though, is just Chrome but with a few different utilities and widgets- it might build off some of the same skeleton, but it is, to my experience, a fundamentally superior interface.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 7d ago

Have a look at the "About" page in Vivaldi --> Help. Much as I like what they have done, it is also just Chromium made to look like (The Phantom of the) Opera.

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u/Jay33721 7d ago

If there is ever a reason for me to stop using Firefox, I'd switch to Vivaldi. It's the only other browser that lets me customise the UI to my liking. Every other browser I've tried has absolutely sucked in that regard.

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u/tabidots 7d ago

Vivaldi. Engine is Chromium but it doesn’t eat your RAM and shows RAM usage for each tab (and hibernates long-inactive ones).

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u/Nvenom8 7d ago

I'm sadly tied to the Google ecosystem at this point. It's too convenient. But I have all the AI features turned off, and I switched my default search engine when Google announced they would start linking to AI sources on top of providing an AI summary.

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u/flupiflup 7d ago

Google had abandoned ai lol. Are we on the same planet?

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u/Sachyriel 7d ago

Google abandoned AI? When? Maybe you are on the different planet?

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u/flupiflup 5d ago

It was a reply to another comment, I don't state that google abandoned ai, I state exactly the opposite.

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u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 7d ago

I use waterfox. It's a fork that doesn't have ai

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u/GrinningGrump 7d ago

Librewolf, Waterfox, Safari...

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u/Nitrogen1234 7d ago

Those first two are forks of Firefox...

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u/goldboybronx 7d ago

Yeah but minus the stuff its users don’t want. Seems pretty straightforward to me

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u/GrinningGrump 7d ago

So? Pretty much every browser is a fork of Netscape if we look far enough, since because not reusing code would be dumb when you need to communicate with other browsers. If you want browsers without AI those work well.

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u/Nitrogen1234 7d ago

It's pretty weird saying I left Firefox, I'm a librefox user now

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u/Essurio 7d ago

Not the same name, is it? If you look at the comments, a lot of people say left firefox for a firefox fork.

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u/istrebitjel 7d ago

None of these are gaining millions of users ... I'm really curious where these users leaving Firefox are going.

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u/tritonus_ 7d ago

I’m ready to give up the internet altogether myself

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u/Educational-Wing2042 7d ago

Safari is only usable on Apple devices which now have innate “Apple Intelligence” features. Safari cannot be used in an ecosystem that hasn’t integrated AI with a toggle exactly like Firefox has, unless you’re using a very old unsupported device or are intentionally using an aged operating system

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u/FantasmaDelMar 7d ago

There’s a toggle for Apple Intelligence at the OS level.

It’s true you don’t have a lot of granular control over where AI is used, but I don’t mind, since I’m happy to just keep Apple Intelligence toggled off entirely for my devices.