I switched to Brave (kevquirk.com)

I think the last major scandal was AI additions (cuz who is using AI these days? What an awful idea!) that you can now turn off with one click? Personally never saw the AI features presented to me once. Then the one before that I can remember was the Mr. Robot thing that was so long ago it's hard to remember what even happened. I think they installed a add-on that wasn't enabled and did absolutely nothing unless you went looking for it and specifically wanted it to do something? And then they removed it very soon after when nerds overreacted so hard that we're still talking about it 10+ years later?

Chrome: inability to block ads, new "cookie free" (nope they didn't get rid of cookies) ad tracking, monitoring people in incognito mode, the list would goes on for a long while. Brave: Crypto nonsense, all kinds of advertising for their crap everywhere unless you go through many hoops to turn it off. Firefox is one of the few pieces of software I can say hasn't enshitified itself to the point of using something else.

I started using Phoenix at version 0.3 (compiling the port on my FreeBSD then-daily-driver) and still use Firefox (and Tor Browser) today. I'm not sure what problem(s) people have with it, but it works for me.

(I also use Safari on my Apple systems, to further diversify web browser usage.)

If you don’t care about browser diversity, and choose to use a Chrome-based browser, that’s part of the collective’s decision. There are literally billions of people just like you, which is why Chrome wins.

You’re trying to act put-upon, but you’re actually supporting the dominant monopoly side. Your apathy is winning, why do you still feel the need to comment? A bit of guilt or cognitive dissonance, perhaps?

It can kill or force technologies.

You can't really replicate that unless you're a trillion dollar company that chooses software defaults on billions of devices and have the world's most visited website.

The hate for Brave is some combination of people dredging up issues from very early in their existence and mischaracterizing them as often as not, and folks that insist that it's jammed full of crypto shit when it's very straightforward to either disable or remove it entirely by just using Brave Origin.

I have used all three of the browsers that you happen to mention aside from Firefox, and while I keep them in my back pocket, Brave is my daily driver. I don't tend to visit a huge variety of websites. I usually have JavaScript disabled when I do so, and I have other privacy preserving mechanisms in place besides just the browser I picked.

I'm happy for folks to trudge on with the Firefox engine, but I no longer see Mozilla as a good custodian of it. I do think the privacy-focused forks of it are good, and worthy of significant attention. On Android, I would also recommend both IronFox and Cromite.

I use FF with FingerprintResist on, and many things such as WebGL outright disabled, on top of very restrictive DNS blacklist and uBlock Origin, and even despite all of that I find Firefox very usable. I can make online payments and book flights and other such things normally. I rarely, if ever, have to use a clean, stock Firefox profile or fall back to Chromium. On machine at least, Firefox gets a higher Speedometer 3.1 score than Chromium.

Not necessarily. Some of us just really don't like using Chromium-based browsers due to usability issues and want to use one that works better for them.

>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.

>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS

Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.

Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.

This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.

People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)

Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.

I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)

I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted for this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.

California passed Proposition 3 to strike Proposition 8's changes from its constitution in 2024, by a convincing margin of over 25%. It passed the state legislature with no votes against.

Contrast this with Proposition 8, which exit polls said had the support of 85% of McCain voters and 30% of Obama voters, passing with a margin of less than 5% in 2008.

> California appealed that decision

Proposition 8 proponents appealed that decision after California's AG and governor both said it should be struck down and refused to defend the California constitution for the first time in the state's history, backing the plaintiffs.

And when you convince somebody with a lie, and they later find out you were lying, you've probably lost them forever. Not smart.

He very clearly was. He directed DOJ not to defend DOMA Section 3, and it fell in the courts, just like all the civil rights promoters wanted. If he hadn't been elected, it would have taken longer. That's why we forgive him for lying. We aren't stupid.

He also publicly identified as Christian, though he wrote that his parents and grandparents are nonbelievers.