I need a new browser
In May this year, I switched from Firefox to Chrome after the Mozilla team rejected one of my crappy browser extensions from their store:
Okay, that wasn’t the entire reason. For years, I’ve been quite annoyed by the design decisions of the developers behind Firefox, with the arbitrary reasons behind not supporting latest web standards such as WebUSB:
It doesn’t help that Mozilla touts Firefox as a privacy-respecting browser, but then turns around and implements crap like an ad-tracking API. And this isn’t even their first dumbest idea: they got caught doing some stupid stuff with a not-funny-at-all easter egg (I can only assume what drugs the marketing team were taking when they came up with that idea).
So I switched. And life was good. For about two months. Then I noticed this in my Chrome settings:
I now need to switch my main browser again.
Features I need
WebUSB / other latest web APIs
I feel like this is the hardest feature to satisfy, so I’m not even going to try. Because right now, the only browser that implements WebUSB seems to be Chromium and co.
Thankfully, not a whole lot of websites use such APIs (yet), so I can just keep a copy of Chromium around for such instances where I do need to interface with a device that uses them.
Again, Mozilla developers, it would be great if this was natively supported and I didn’t have to install a “privacy-invading” browser as you guys claim to do something like reflash my Arduino boards. Unfortunately, the Mozilla Specifications Positions page makes their stance on WebUSB quite clear:
(…) Because many USB devices are not designed to handle potentially-malicious interactions over the USB protocols and because those devices can have significant effects on the computer they’re connected to, we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them or to explain properly to end users to obtain meaningful informed consent. It also poses risks that sites could use USB device identity or data stored on USB devices as tracking identifiers.
Okay, then feature-flag it and chuck it in about:config for people that do understand how it works. You guys love sticking config options in there anyway. Why not one more?
Honestly, if the permission dialog for WebUSB/WebBluetooth/etc. had a giant scary triangle with yellow or red colors that screamed “this is dangerous” then I think it’s deterrent enough for regular users to hit “Deny”.
Sync
Chrome’s Sync is really, really good. I don’t think I had a history item that didn’t sync across devices.
Contrast that with Firefox Sync, and you just know Mozilla’s implementation isn’t as good. Personally, I’ve had so many issues with syncing that it drives me crazy. Sending tabs to devices is a crapshoot and every now and then it doesn’t work.
However, I can’t make a concession on this point, because I value being able to pick up my work right where I left off on my other devices. Loading up a long article on my laptop, and then riding the subway and reading that same article on my phone becomes much more cumbersome if I have to manually copy and paste URLs around.
Which leads us right to…
Mobile apps
I’m currently back on my iPhone after the disastrous attempt of switching to Android a couple of months ago, which means every browser is just reskinned WebKit. (Unless you’re in the EU, of course, because that’s where you get actual basic human rights, apparently.)
Again, Chrome makes the best of it with WebKit, but Firefox’s iOS app is quite buggy. I don’t blame the developers, but there are still outstanding bug reports that I filed a few years back that have still yet to be fixed. (Like this, this, and this. And some that I didn’t report but personally encountered, such as this one.)
Unfortunately, LibreWolf – the Firefox fork I was eyeing – do not have any mobile apps, and from what I can gather from their documentation, don’t have any immediate plans on creating any. Coupled with the previous Sync requirement, this rules out a vast majority of browsers that don’t have a big developer team behind it, at least for me and for the time being.
uBlock Origin
This is another hard requirement of mine, and one which rules out nearly all Chromium-based browsers immediately. (Why else would I be switching from Chrome?)
Brave is a Chromium-based browser that claims they’ll retain Manifest V2 after Google yanks and kills it, but this hinges on Google not removing the code paths from Chromium as referenced in the Brave CEO’s tweet (or Xeet or whatever they call it nowadays). They think it’s required for enterprise support, but I don’t want to switch browsers yet again if their bet turns out to be a dud.
Switching to…
So for the time being, it seems like I’ll grudgingly be going back to Firefox, and staying there until a better alternative pops up or until Mozilla manages to kill it for good.
Just like a NLE video editor, it seems like good browsers are hard to come by.