Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

As a Firefox user since its beta, there is? Last I checked there remain 3 browser engines left. Mozilla’s Gecko, Google’s Blink, and Apple’s Webkit. Everything else is just variants using those engines, and the vast majority of those variants (Opera, Brave, Edge, etc) are Chromium-based/using Blink. That’s not a lot of difference. If you really want to get away from chrome, your mainstream option is just Firefox. Unless you’re on a Mac, or iPhone. Where you can choose between Firefox and safari.


> Unless you’re on a Mac, or iPhone. Where you can choose between Firefox and Safari.

On iPhone it's all WebKit. Apple doesn't (yet!) allow Firefox to use Gecko.


Doesn't Firefox use Quantum now? Gecko is what used XUL and it was buried when they switched to WebExtensions.

Pale Moon uses a fork of Gecko called Goanna.

SerenityOS has an independent browser in the works, and netsurf is still around.

There are options, but people have put most of their eggs into two baskets and now we're stuck with things looking mostly the same but some have antifeatures.

I want a browser with uBO's functionality simply built in. Fuck your extensions or other attempts to endrun, Google. Stop it at the source and build request filtering into browsers directly.


> Unless you’re on a Mac, or iPhone. Where you can choose between Firefox and safari.

AFAIK, you cannot, on iPhone you're forced to use Safari (all other browsers forced by Apple to be reskins of Safari).


Calling Firefox "mainstream" is being very generous at this point, I recall its marketshare is in the single digit percentage points.


How many hundreds of millions of users would you say it needs to have until you can call it mainstream non-generously?


Maybe above single digit market share percentage?


Lots of us have to spoof the chrome UA to get shitty sites to work




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: