logoalt Hacker News

Lovesongyesterday at 9:37 PM4 repliesview on HN

Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.

Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.


Replies

tentacleunoyesterday at 9:45 PM

Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.

They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].

As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.

[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...

show 1 reply
0cf8612b2e1eyesterday at 9:49 PM

I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.

dartharvatoday at 4:03 AM

Most office IT actively blocks it.

cookiengineertoday at 1:20 AM

For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.

Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.

On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.

So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.

That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.

I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/chromium-profiles