I migrated from Firefox to Brave years ago, and it's been incredible. It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff and turn on more advanced privacy protection. Then it's just a fast browser with awesome adblocking.<p>My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.<p>I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.
The Greasemonkey Firefox addon that allows you to run site specific JS has been around for two decades [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/" rel="nofollow">https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/</a>
> It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff<p>I'm living under a rock, but my first thought was that you turned off TLS.
As a developer, personally I would be worried if that wasn't my first thought when someone uses browser and crypto together :D
If your mind goes to TLS when you read crypto, you surely do live under a rock ... in bliss.
Even better now that they have a paid offering with all that crap stripped out (Brave Origin) which is free on Linux.
I hope this isn't a precursor to removing support for other AdBlock addons(MV2) citing native availability of an AdBlock engine and then gradually shift to acceptable ads etc.
The day Firefox drops MV2 is the day I find a new browser. We're already at <1% usershare, it's not like there's safety in numbers here
I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.<p>Brave still allows you to install uBlock & some other extensions that should technically not be supported under MV3, but they still ship it with support for those.<p>Just heard about Helium browser, which is just dechromium + uBlock and it's still beta.
> Firefox is the last holdout.<p>Nope, FF is being infiltrated by adtech for last year or two. Last holdout is Safari now :)
> I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.<p>My last hope is ladybird right now, I don't use Firefox or Chrome as my main browsers anymore, and use them only within temporary sandboxes. Without history, without cookies, without logins for the most part.
Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.<p>That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.<p>I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).
>Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.<p>There is no feature Firefox provides that is more differentiating than ublock origin. As long as pages load and security issues are patched it is the reason to choose Firefox as a browser. What would they prioritize over it?
I’d like to see more investment in their new profile manager. It feels pretty barebones at the moment. Arc had the ability to link profiles to “spaces” and you could easily switch between them without opening a new window. It was very nice to so easily swap between personal, work, & side business.
> Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.<p>The feature that better adblockers need is one callback that's similar to one that's still in V3. It's not difficult to keep if it's your own codebase.
Try Zen! Firefox fork with Arc-like UX.
If this means that they release a iOS version with the same Adblock features as brave then I’m sold.
I use essentially all OSs and I want a browser with basic features like adblocking/custom filters on all the platforms and currently Firefox fails this on iOS devices.
Still I believe the Firefox sync is much more robust than eg. Brave one , among various platforms.
But then I will also need Firefox to fix keyboard shortcuts on Android which they had until the Fenix rebase some years ago and still haven’t fixed since
This feels like a betrayal of their ousting of Eich in the first place. I can't imagine a world I would do this and be able to look at myself in the mirror.
I think people are reading into this too much - I don’t think Mozilla would ever implement an actual full spectrum ad blocker (although who knows with the new direction Firefox is headed), this will likely be used as an improvement/replacement for the current tracking protection implementation.<p>Weirdly enough, the same time this was added to Geckko is when I started implementing the adblock-rs library for Waterfox - I stumbled across the bindings by accident when using searchfox on the main branch instead of esr140! Quite the coincidence doing it at the same time.
Does this benefit people that use uBlock Origin?<p>Maybe uBlock Origin for Firefox could be updated to make use of this
It's surprising, and disappointing that this hasn't happened sooner. A real shame that it took a browser company other than Mozilla to make (In Rust no less!) adblock-rust. I wonder if this could've been a native Firefox feature and selling point years ago if Eich wasn't kicked out.