Firefox Lite is dead: development has ended
Firefox Lite, a mobile version of the Firefox web browser designed specifically for Asia, won't receive any updates anymore after June 30, 2021.
Developed by Mozilla Taiwan, Firefox Lite was released in 2018 for Google's Android operating system. The browser was designed for Asian markets, not included on Google Play, but was not region-locked either. Anyone with access to the APK file could install it on a compatible Android device.
Firefox Lite was based on Chromium WebView, and not on Mozilla's own rendering engine; this set it apart from Firefox for Android but also from many Chromium-based browsers for Android, as one focus of development was privacy.
The web browser came with a Turbo Mode that blocked known trackers and advertising, options to block the loading of images, and also a component that highlighted coupons on specific sites.
Our only review of Firefox Lite dates back to 2019 when Firefox Lite 2.0 was released.
Mozilla laid off 250 employees in 2020 as part of a restructuring of the organization. Active Firefox Lite development ended and development switched over to maintenance mode. Mozilla did release patches for the mobile browser in that time that focused on security fixes.
A recent SUMO overview on Mozilla's website confirms the end of Firefox Lite. The browser was sunset on June 1, 2021, and will be abandoned on June 30, 2021. Firefox Lite won't receive any updates, security or otherwise, after June 30, 2021 anymore.
Mozilla recommends that users switch to the new version of its Firefox web browser for Android.
Firefox for Android offers a different experience, since it is not based on Chromium WebView. Some features can be added by installing extensions, e.g. to block advertisement or prevent tracking, but others may not be supported by Firefox for Android. Most Chromium-based browsers don't support extensions at all, on the other hand.
Closing Words
Mozilla maintains two main browsers for Android currently, even after the abandoning of Firefox Lite. There is the main Firefox web browser for Android and Firefox Focus/Klar. The classic Firefox web browser for Android is not supported anymore, just like Firefox Lite.
Now You: which mobile browser do you use? (via Sören Hentzschel)
Vivaldi. Problem solved…..
Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker is just milking this company. She fired 250+ employees and she is getting a raise in her wage every year. She is getting paid more than $3 million per year and Firefox usage percent is dropping every year. Their only source of income is search engine agreements which heavily depends on Google. The Google literally keeps the Firefox alive so that they won’t face a monopoly lawsuit because of Chrome/Chromium browser wihch most of the browsers based on.
Not to mention Mitchell Baker advocated censorship and has sided against freedom of speech and demanded “more than deplatforming” on the official Mozilla blog. Firefox was once all about privacy and freedom of speech not anymore.
Firefox is not on a financially bad situation afaik. They are getting paid $500 Million by google alone. I am sure they have a lot of money on their bank account which will end up in Mitchell Baker’s bank account every year for advocating cencorship.
grow up – usage share is not the same as revenue
About “Firefox Lite”
According to the World Health Statistics for 2021 released by WHO, the total population of the world is about 7,676.96 million, and the country with the largest population is China with about 1,441.86 million. The second-largest country is India, with about 1,366.41 million people. The number of Overseas Chinese residing abroad exceeds 50 million (2018 estimate).
Overseas Chinese | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese
Focusing on the existence of these “Overseas Chinese”, Mozilla Taiwan has developed a product for use specifically for Overseas Chinese use cases (mobile). However, due to strong restrictions from the Chinese authorities (forced to limit functions), development was difficult. It was an unknown (dedicated products for overseas Chinese) entity that gave up on continuing development last year.
In short, the presence of the Chinese authorities closed the way for “Firefox Lite”.
From these cases, and cases such as Audacity,
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/04/audacity-controversy-continues-with-newly-published-privacy-notice/#comment-4499578
it is clear that the power of the states such as China and Russia pose a serious threat to the free and open Web.
About “China Risk”
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/04/audacity-controversy-continues-with-newly-published-privacy-notice/#comment-4499947
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/04/audacity-controversy-continues-with-newly-published-privacy-notice/#comment-4500091
> it is clear that the power of the states such as China and Russia pose a serious threat to the free and open Web.
USA is the pioneer of free and open web, right?
Duckduckgo browser. Would switch to Brave as soon as they release a F-droid compatible version.
> Firefox Lite was based on Chromium WebView, and not on Mozilla’s own rendering engine
I am still trying to work this one out, and can’t even blame weather for my non-funcitioning brain…
Mozilla Corp is lost and circling the drain.
Brain trust and finances tanking!
Focus. Didn’t know Lite existed.
Interesting, I asked the kids if Focus was still OK, maybe they want Bromite or something that is closer to a desktop browser. They didn’t care, said Focus was fine since they rarely use a browser, and disabled Chrome but under no conditions could I remove AdGuard.
Three years of insufferable Chromebooking did that.
Given the normal dismal experience of using a phone browser, I wonder how many people really do use them often vs. lots of apps.
Get Fennec from the F-Droid app store and get better support for add-ons and the latest Firefox code base. I would rather have classic Firefox but this is as close as you get for now without loading a legacy version.
I’d love to see a fork of Firefox Klar/Focus when it used Webview as its rendering engine.
In a few years this will be Mozilla itself.
But then where would Waterfox, Palemoon, and Librewolf get their patches?
PM for Android stopped being developed years ago.
And Tor.
> Waterfox, Palemoon, and Librewolf get their patches?
> And Tor.
All of those forked versions have “Firefox ESR” as their platform.
Patches are applied from the platform.
All of those forked browsers have “Firefox ESR” as their platform.
Patches are applied from the platform.
For a moment I was hoping the “lite” was just a mistake in the title. oh well! maybe next time!!
Still nothing of value was lost. :)
Now the only thing left is to have development of Firefox for mobile and PC to end development.
@Dumbledalf,
What reason?!
We need an alternative to the evil platformers “Google, Microsoft”.
Your favorite Vivaldi browser is still flying very low with 2.2 million users, far from the profit line (based on 10 million users), and is on the verge of stalling.
Brave has only just reached 20 million users.
It is only the platformers (Google and Microsoft) who will be happy if the opposing axis pulls each other’s leg (in order to support their favored browsers).
@owl
Please stop calling Mozilla an “alternative”. Alternative to what exactly? Mozilla is an incompetently run, Google-dependent, pro-censorship, anti-freedom organization that enables user data theft just like their competitors do. Firefox has no values that anyone should be supportive of, and if you think that the 3% market share of Firefox are somehow able to shift the balance, any balance really, you are sadly mistaken and you are making a fool out of yourself.
As far as Vivaldi and Brave are concerned: In Vivaldi’s case, they don’t have name recognition, and the amount of users who are heavily into customization seems to be limited. In Brave’s case, again no name recognition, but steadier growth because it can be a drop-in replacement for Chrome minus the Google. Those two browsers do not profit from name recognition built during an era where the only competitor was the awful Internet Explorer 6, like Firefox does. These two browsers are entering into a market where the competitors are actually competent and work well enough for most users. Convincing users to switch from IE6 to FF back in the day wasn’t hard, convincing users to switch from Chrome to Brave is hard, because yeah, “Chrome just works, why switch?”. Considering this, it’s actually a miracle how Firefox got run into the ground like it happened, and the performance of at least Brave so far is also noteworthy.
So yeah, @owl, I am actually cheering for the demise of the anti-user organization that is Mozilla. It’s just another misguided company doomed to fail in my book, and their highly overrated status among some readers here is baffling to me.
@Iron Heart,
Both Vivaldi and Brave are well known.
They have a history of being thrust into the limelight by Opera and Brendan Eich’s great achievement, and everyone has tried them. So the current user base is not because they are unknown, but because they have tried them and stopped using them.
Incidentally, Vivaldi has two CEOs, one of whom is Japanese. Therefore, there is no one in Japan who does not know about Vivaldi. However, there are very few people who continue to use it.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/06/09/vivaldi-4-0-introduces-translate-feature-and-mail-calendar-and-feed-reader-functionality/#comment-4496876
Everyone who is a Firefox user knows Brave. And it is very well known in Japan. Regardless of your forceful arguments, Brave is probably the only thing you can expect from Chromium.
The axis of confrontation is against the “platformers” who dominate the market, so no matter what you think, “Mozilla” is the axis of confrontation.
So, no matter what you think, “Mozilla” is the axis of conflict.
This response is already off-topic.
I have only replied to what I have to say to you.
I will not engage in any more off-topics.
@owl
A browser with slightly above 2 million users, with no major ad campaigns, and with not being present in certain charts (e.g. Play Store) has no name recognition, sorry. Not buying it. We shouldn’t mistake the gHacks techie bubble for the outside world. Same for Brave, to a lesser extent (has over 30 million monthly active users now and can be considered mainstream in the short term if the growth continues).
What you say about Mozilla is still laughable. My dear @owl, Google still pays Mozilla’s bills, and they are an enemy of the open web just like their sponsor is. Which “axis” do you speak of? Because they use another engine? Don’t make me laugh, they’ll suppress you just like Google, no matter the foundational technology.
@Iron Heart
“As far as Vivaldi and Brave are concerned: In Vivaldi’s case, they don’t have name recognition, and the amount of users who are heavily into customization seems to be limited. In Brave’s case, again no name recognition, but steadier growth because it can be a drop-in replacement for Chrome minus the Google. Those two browsers do not profit from name recognition built during an era where the only competitor was the awful Internet Explorer 6, like Firefox does. These two browsers are entering into a market where the competitors are actually competent and work well enough for most users. Convincing users to switch from IE6 to FF back in the day wasn’t hard, convincing users to switch from Chrome to Brave is hard, because yeah, “Chrome just works, why switch?”. Considering this, it’s actually a miracle how Firefox got run into the ground like it happened, and the performance of at least Brave so far is also noteworthy.”
Brave shill at it again. Even Brave team would be ashamed or maybe feel proud at how blind its fan is.
Vivaldi don’t have name recognition – good joke.
Brave case no name recognition – again good joke. No name recognition is for Firefox which build itself. Look at Brave – Millions in funding for a fork, build by a person happens to be a CEO at Mozilla before(though rightfully stepped away), and includes some stupid articles trashing Firefox for telemetry when Brave itself is not developing Browser Engine. And again Brave search would have no name recognition, right, say compared to DuckDuckGo.
Seriously trashing Firefox as if your life depends on it, eh?
Other companies like Vivaldi need to stop development of their browser. It is a failure of a browser.
@Dumbledalf
Well, as their browser becomes more and more incompatible with the web (because why bother to test for 3% of the entire Internet population,objectively a total waste of time), there are two possible scenarios for Mozilla’s future:
1) They give up on Firefox entirely, and become and Internet activist organization. I could actually see this happening, because even now, they seem to invest more time into calls for even more censorship online than they do into Firefox. Go to their website, especially their blog – it basically screams far left activism, their CEO (a lawyer) seems to live the activism with every pore of her body. Why not make this their main thing at this point?
https://www.weforum.org/organizations/mozilla-corporation
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/big-tech-cannot-crack-down-on-online-hate-alone/
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
2) Same as (1), except now they create a Chromium-based browser and slap the Firefox brand on it as a pretense, firing not all engineers, but retaining some of them to work on the Chromium fork, but with Google now doing the heavy lifting for them. This would be born partly out of necessity (nobody uses Firefox anymore, failing web compatibility), and partly because browser development is hard and unrewarding, with talk and “activism” being so much more fun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24590174
If you don’t like firefox and don’t know what is going on behind the scene for ita developers, then go and use your brave or anything else you like.
Don’t troll in every firefox post.
Don’t humiliate the great amount of work that firefox developers done untill now to make that complex and bloated rendering engine that inherited to them by netscape to a modern, multi process, secure, fast and on par to their competitors.
Especially those that afraid to help to maintain another engine and gone the easy route and let chromium do heavy work for them!
Go and read some enjoying articles instead in your browser that have 99.99999 percent market share.
Good luck.
Regards.
@Iron Heart [Editor: please use the correct user name when addressing someone. Thank you]
“Well, as their browser becomes more and more incompatible with the web (because why bother to test for 3% of the entire Internet population,objectively a total waste of time), there are two possible scenarios for Mozilla’s future:
1) They give up on Firefox entirely, and become and Internet activist organization. I could actually see this happening, because even now, they seem to invest more time into calls for even more censorship online than they do into Firefox. Go to their website, especially their blog – it basically screams far left activism, their CEO (a lawyer) seems to live the activism with every pore of her body. Why not make this their main thing at this point?
https://www.weforum.org/organizations/mozilla-corporation
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/big-tech-cannot-crack-down-on-online-hate-alone/
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
2) Same as (1), except now they create a Chromium-based browser and slap the Firefox brand on it as a pretense, firing not all engineers, but retaining some of them to work on the Chromium fork, but with Google now doing the heavy lifting for them. This would be born partly out of necessity (nobody uses Firefox anymore, failing web compatibility), and partly because browser development is hard and unrewarding, with talk and “activism” being so much more fun.”
Looks like Firefox hater is back, incidentally happens to be a Brave shill which is the flawed solution for second point. Bromite is better which didn’t needed millions in funding in the first place to create a browser which doesn’t have its own engine and is nothing more than a fork.
Also I’m waiting for the day when Firefox would stop working and Tor Organisation would switch to imaginary better for security and privacy browser – Chromium created by ethical and non-profit trillion dollar organisation with privacy invasion as its main business.
For your first point, looking at the links you shared, you clearly misunderstood everything. I guess you’re more than sad to see an ORANGE IDIOT BILLIONAIRE lose its account, after all that’s modern society. Nothing stirred up users, not even their privacy invasion, but when it came down to an idiot man losing his account, directly responsible for deaths and other illegal activities, some lose their minds.
@Yash
Can you please stop with this type of fanboy micro aggression? You said nothing of value, and all you are really doing is wasting time by defending a blatant anti-user organization.
Bromite – literal who? I hope you realize that one guy is not enough to maintain A) a browser, B) a search engine and C) a privacy-respecting ad ecosystem. Yeah, I wonder why Brave has inventors and why it’s not just one guy running things, considering this. *facepalm*
The Tor Browser would improve in several aspects by switching to Chromium, the most obvious ones being security, web compatibility, and performance. Arguably also UI familiarity. The reason they stick with Firefox is because all of their patches are written for it, because they have historically used it. But they could also use e.g. Ungoogled Chromium and rewrite their patches for Chromium, it’s just a ton of work that is not strictly necessary as long as Mozilla still develops Firefox. But yeah, Tor would be better if it used Chromium today (it will, eventually).
You are also shitting on the same trillion dollar organization that also keeps the lights on for Mozilla, how weird is that? :D You guys should stop pretending to be heroic anti-Google fighters as long as Google pays the salaries of all the Mozilla staff. Firefox by default also enables various forms of “privacy invasions” that you like to complain about.
Later on you also act as if Brave had some serious brand recognition compared to Firefox / Chrome / Safari, which is laughable. It is a fairly new project entering a market where the competitors aren’t sleeping and are producing capable browsers as well. Firefox only had to beat the shitware IE6 back in the day (was incredibly hard to be better than them, I imagine), at times having 30% of the Internet population under its belt, and still managed to bork it and end up with 3% market share, despite the huge brand and success back in the day. That’s called running a company into the ground, in case you are unaware. Current day Mozilla is a shadow of its former self, and is now known for being an outspoken enemy of the free speech online. Speaking of which…
…this whole thing is not just about OrANge MaN bAd (according to you, the first ever president who droned people to death, and the first ever who violated the law while in office…), this is about embarrassingly obvious power grabs of one side of the political spectrum, the censorship of a significant part of the population (yeah, just one guy got censored of course, ask the Yash!), and about the defense of constitutional principles, or indeed, human rights (free speech = human right, in case you are unaware). I don’t know about you (and honestly, I don’t really want to know), but I don’t like one opinion societies, or one party dictatorships. I don’t want western societies to turn into what Cuba or North Korea are now. I just don’t. In order to ensure that this does not happen eventually, freedom of speech must be upheld, and power grabs of one side of the political spectrum must be avoided. That’s what’s called a working democracy representing multiple opinions, dear Yash.
Since you are defending an organization that has openly expressed a totalitarian mindset, you are probably sharing said mindset, which means that you are nothing more than a totalitarian-minded creep – but you will soon learn that playing little dictator is not an opinion everyone out there is supportive of. I don’t like you or your ilk, however you would score one honesty point with me at least, if you just admitted to not wanting to live in a democratic state anymore. Supporting dictatorship under the guise of democracy is dishonesty.
The rest of your useless ramblings, like your hatred for Eich and his personal religious beliefs about what marriage should be, and his subsequent bullying-into-resignation at Mozilla (which of course had nothing to do with Mitchell “Ma” Baker wanting the job at the time) that you support, are equally worthless, and totally inconsequential. Eich is doing fine, and his politics-free product is doing fine, both of which, I am sure, wouldn’t be the case if he stayed at the toxic and failing far left hive otherwise known as Mozilla. Does that actually make you mad, Mozilla bullying the guy into resignation, and the same guy succeeding anyways? :D
You also seem to be oblivious to the fact that Eich, who left the company 7 years ago, is not the main reason for current day Mozilla not doing well. The main reason is currently in charge of Mozilla!
Could you leave me alone with your incoherent, inconsequential, and pointless ramblings? Could you please also leave me alone with your Kim Yong Un mindset? Is that conceivable for you? Yes? Then please, do so, leave me alone. Take your business elsewhere.
@Iron Heart
“Bromite – literal who? I hope you realize that one guy is not enough to maintain A) a browser, B) a search engine and C) a privacy-respecting ad ecosystem.”
According to Daniel Micay(who I should be thankful according to you, although he isn’t the only security expert in the world), it is the browser to use along with Vanadium. Yeah one man job and all that, though Bromite has included some protection against Javascript which is not present in a ‘team’ browser called Brave.
“The Tor Browser would improve in several aspects by switching to Chromium, the most obvious ones being security, web compatibility, and performance. Arguably also UI familiarity.”
Remember these words, they will come back to haunt you.
“You are also shitting on the same trillion dollar organization that also keeps the lights on for Mozilla, how weird is that? :D You guys should stop pretending to be heroic anti-Google fighters as long as Google pays the salaries of all the Mozilla staff. Firefox by default also enables various forms of “privacy invasions” that you like to complain about.”
Says who :-D
Though Brave is fully dependent, you know that right? Not to mention content blockers would stop working on Brave with Manifest V3, never gonna happen in Firefox, so whose fully dependent?
“Later on you also act as if Brave had some serious brand recognition compared to Firefox / Chrome / Safari, which is laughable. It is a fairly new project entering a market where the competitors aren’t sleeping and are producing capable browsers as well. Firefox only had to beat the shitware IE6 back in the day (was incredibly hard to be better than them, I imagine), at times having 30% of the Internet population under its belt, and still managed to bork it and end up with 3% market share, despite the huge brand and success back in the day.”
Ever heard of anti-competitive practices? The same for which Google is fined billions every year along with other big tech. Yeah enjoy 30% and 3% nonsense.
“…this whole thing is not just about OrANge MaN bAd (according to you, the first ever president who droned people to death, and the first ever who violated the law while in office…)”
Very good interpretation of my words above there by saying first ever president, good job. Seriously that’s what you think?
“this is about embarrassingly obvious power grabs of one side of the political spectrum, the censorship of a significant part of the population (yeah, just one guy got censored of course, ask the Yash!), and about the defense of constitutional principles, or indeed, human rights (free speech = human right, in case you are unaware). I don’t know about you (and honestly, I don’t really want to know), but I don’t like one opinion societies, or one party dictatorships.”
Very good example, though people of all opinion are getting censored. Seems like you’re disgusted by just one part of that whose opinion directly affects and affected certain communities, whether you like or not. Read newspapers of all opinions.
“Since you are defending an organization that has openly expressed a totalitarian mindset, you are probably sharing said mindset, which means that you are nothing more than a totalitarian-minded creep – but you will soon learn that playing little dictator is not an opinion everyone out there is supportive of. I don’t like you or your ilk, however you would score one honesty point with me at least, if you just admitted to not wanting to live in a democratic state anymore. Supporting dictatorship under the guise of democracy is dishonesty. ”
I’m still laughing at this after reading it many times.
“The rest of your useless ramblings, like your hatred for Eich and his personal religious beliefs about what marriage should be, and his subsequent bullying-into-resignation at Mozilla (which of course had nothing to do with Mitchell “Ma” Baker wanting the job at the time) that you support, are equally worthless, and totally inconsequential.”
You didn’t read my comment properly. I said he rightfully stepped away. I can agree on one thing that he shouldn’t be criticised for certain beliefs but then he didn’t help himself by facing the questions directly, hence stepped away. Though I have no sympathy for him, just check his twitter account, causing murmurs in Brave organisation, and yeah that’s called totalitarian mindset. And that also includes some personal beliefs of other people which directly affects certain communities.
“You also seem to be oblivious to the fact that Eich, who left the company 7 years ago, is not the main reason for current day Mozilla not doing well. The main reason is currently in charge of Mozilla!”
Again not reading properly. I didn’t anything like that so stop lying.
Now some real world facts, I’m not what you called a left activist or anything like that. I consider myself liberal and sometimes hate both modern day democrats and republicans as both are unnecessarily pushing people to extremism. At the end of the day, the power must be shared with user also which Big Tech doesn’t allow and Dems didn’t do anything years ago when they had the chance. So before writing again, first don’t lie about things I didn’t said in the first place, and use common sense by not involving politics(especially extremism type which is harming certain communities where you want to accept it or not) with Tech.
@Yash
No idea why you are still citing Bromite, this is a project that is manageable by one guy because it has a very limited set of goals, while Brave is not. One example? Brave recently implemented IPFS support, do you realize how many man hours it would take to implement this if Brave Software consisted of one guy? It really depends on the GOALS of the project how big of a staff you need.
No idea why you think Tor couldn’t use Blink – it’s just a rendering engine. The reason they don’t switch is their patches being written for Firefox / Gecko currently, why is this so hard to understand? There is little reason for them to throw that away and cause themselves a great amount of grief rewriting all of it for Chromium, as long as Firefox is still being developed.
You are also still(!) harping about Manifest V3, which is a security improvement. Extensions can no longer intercept connections, and redirect them. Malware extensions use this extensively, and Google aims to put a halt to that. Brave’s Shields are not an extension and won’t be affected by any resulting limitations, not sure why you think that I will somehow be unable to block ads just when Manifest V3, aimed at extensions, hits. This doesn’t affect Brave users.
You are cheaply blaming ominous “anti-competitive practices” for the downfall of Firefox, when in reality, it just had shitty performance compared to the first version of Chrome in 2008. Chrome executed Javascript 30 times faster than Firefox at the time. Chrome had a less cluttered interface, capable web developer tools (web devs were joining in droves back then), was multiprocess from the get go (so it didn’t choke and crash on JavaScript-heavy websites like Firefox did back in the day), and had consistent extension APIs, so that extensions didn’t break with every update. In short, it was better all around, and contrary to your myth building, the vast majority downloaded it consciously and dropped Firefox like a hot potato. But yeah, “anti-competitive practices” were of course the reason why the inferior product failed… /s Perhaps they should focus more on the engineering now and less on the politics, maybe then there will be a non-ideological reason to use Firefox in 2021. Oh wait, they fired the engineers but kept Mitchell, so not going to happen…
The rest of your – once more – pointless comment I won’t even react to, because it’s just more smearing of Eich and you trying to explain why you are somehow not an enemy of free speech while defending an anti-free speech commie organization. Funny satire.
@Iron Heart
“No idea why you are still citing Bromite, this is a project that is manageable by one guy because it has a very limited set of goals, while Brave is not. One example? Brave recently implemented IPFS support, do you realize how many man hours it would take to implement this if Brave Software consisted of one guy? It really depends on the GOALS of the project how big of a staff you need.”
You again write all this and didn’t understand the point, Bromite is the best Chromium browser and it has security enhancements which are better than Brave, take latest attempt for Javascript security. So before writing goals and whatnot, consider the aspect of a browser first. Bromite has security enhancements and yet perfectly usable for normies.
IPFS support in Brave? Well that’s the first time I’ve seen it in any browser after seeing it in many browsers, so congrats.
Understand this again, I have no hate against Brave, his founder or anyone else, despite his religional or political views which should be applied to every product including Firefox. And Brave is improving, it now allows to hide local IP address in latest updates(same as Firefox was doing it for years) but that doesn’t mean it is better than Bromite or that I should stop using Firefox for it, or that user.js file is total trash or that Firefox trashing by a Brave fan is acceptable.
“No idea why you think Tor couldn’t use Blink – it’s just a rendering engine. The reason they don’t switch is their patches being written for Firefox / Gecko currently, why is this so hard to understand? There is little reason for them to throw that away and cause themselves a great amount of grief rewriting all of it for Chromium, as long as Firefox is still being developed.”
I would encourage you to visit Tor website and find the reasons for not using Chromium and certain issues in it, before writing about this topic again.
“You are also still(!) harping about Manifest V3, which is a security improvement. Extensions can no longer intercept connections, and redirect them. Malware extensions use this extensively, and Google aims to put a halt to that. Brave’s Shields are not an extension and won’t be affected by any resulting limitations, not sure why you think that I will somehow be unable to block ads just when Manifest V3, aimed at extensions, hits. This doesn’t affect Brave users.”
Hahahahaha. Seriously you trashed Firefox and said it has no solution for this in multiple articles here at Ghacks, and when Firefox has a workaround, you immediately wear security improvement hat.
I’ve said this multiple times now that uBlock Origin does more things than blocking ads, so before writing again consider script blocking and other things possible by content blockers which will stop working in Brave, not in Firefox as I always said.
As for Firefox usage, first I didn’t brought that up and second if you don’t know anything about anti-competitive practices which includes things other than browsers, don’t write about it. You’re the one who brought back Internet Explorer and percentage usage and whatnot and so when it comes down to facing FACTS, don’t hide.
“The rest of your – once more – pointless comment I won’t even react to, because it’s just more smearing of Eich and you trying to explain why you are somehow not an enemy of free speech while defending an anti-free speech commie organization. Funny satire.”
Smearing of Eich – well spotted. For other things I can only laugh, coz when it comes down to facing facts, you quickly change the topic.
Before writing anything else, read this https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-apps-windows-1390263/ I’m in no way saying Android Authority is for privacy, but this article is good.
@Yash
Could you, like, stop wasting my time? You come up with the same BS over and over again and it is just tiresome at this point.
Brave has more goals than just improving the privacy of Chromium, it is also a privacy-respecting ad ecosystem, and it implements other things like e.g. IPFS. You can’t compare that to Bromite which has a much more limited goal. Furthermore, Bromite does things of which you claim that they are improvements, when in fact they are snake oil or even counterproductive, like e.g. hiding low value info (one sticks out much more by hiding it than by showing it). Why is this better according to you? You cannot make a substantiated technical argument to support this.
I am aware of the “issues” Tor cites for Chromium and none of them are insurmountable. The problem is, they expect upstream to fix it, and none of the major contributors, including Google, has a motivation to do so. That being said, Chromium is open source, so they could fix it in their downstream fork as well, it just shifts the maintenance burden for the applicable patch from Google to the Tor project. Again, Tor would significantly benefit from being based on Chromium, this would improve its web compatibility, performance, security – basically everything. And it will eventually happen anyway, after Firefox becomes even more irrelevant than it already is and web devs stop supporting it for good.
You have not presented an argument against the fact that Manifest V3 is a security improvement, because it is. It is very hard to argue against taking away the ability of extensions to directly monitor, intercept, and redirect traffic to potentially malicious destinations, isn’t it? This has nothing to do with script blocking, the extension can still hand its custom rules to the browser, it just can’t directly intercept connections anymore. You understand absolutely nothing, and this point was and is totally moot to begin with, because Brave’s adblocker is not an extension.
Firefox was shit compared to Chrome in 2008 and it’s still playing catchup. The only technical advantage they had was gutted in 2017 when they killed bootstrapped extensions. Only bullshit ideological reasons to use it remain in 2021, and even those are purely thought out and have massive holes in them. Firefox is worse at everything: Worse security, worse web compatibility, worse performance, worse extension selection, worse web dev tools! It’s better for privacy than Chrome, but loses to Brave and other privacy-enhanced Chromium forks. And no, the shitty bandaid fix called user.js is not solving any issue, and makes especially the fingerprinting threat worse instead of better. And yet, despite all of this, you are still harping on “anticompetitive practices”, whatever that means. Is this a codeword for the incompetence of Mozilla’s devs, who introduced real site isolation in 2021, a decade after Chromium? LOL. I am done here.
> (…) but that doesn’t mean it is better than Bromite or that I should stop using Firefox for it, or that user.js file is total trash or that Firefox trashing by a Brave fan is acceptable.
Unfortunately for you, this is exactly what it means. Bromite isn’t the miracle worker you make it out to be, sometimes I get the feeling that they do certain things to give their users a positive feeling that something was done at all, even when said something is totally pointless or even counterproductive. Like hiding the device info or network info, both of which can be found out in other ways and both of which shouldn’t be hidden because that makes you stick out more instead of less. But then we hit the wall of your lack of understanding again, because you still think that hiding info is the same as reducing your uniqueness, which is factually wrong. The opposite can be the case. Hiding info can increase your uniqueness especially when nobody else does it. You’ll never fix this misunderstanding, so I wont discuss this grotesque error of judgement of yours with you any further.
This is funny, by the way:
> or that Firefox trashing by a Brave fan is acceptable.
It is 101% acceptable and doesn’t happen often enough. As long as Firefox has worse default privacy than Brave, as long as Brave is being criticized for irrelevancies unrelated to user privacy (prime example: Your pointless Eich smearing) while Deplatformingfox at the same time gets away with user data theft, and as long as the ideologues in charge of Mozilla continue to assault the free and open web they falsely claim to protect, as long as all this is the case, I will be using Brave and defend it against clueless or malicious attacks of promoters of Firefox. Is that understood? Our opinions on Mozilla are diametrically opposed to each other, accept that and move on.
@Iron Heart
This paragraph written by someone else here at Ghacks on another article fits perfectly to your nonsense – ‘Maybe you should try a bit harder to read and understand what someone has actually said next time before responding, because when your response address points that were not raised and fails to address those that were, while also resorting to insults, it comes across as a bit ranty.’
Now what you wrote in your latest comment is totally false. So lets begin
“Brave has more goals than just improving the privacy of Chromium, it is also a privacy-respecting ad ecosystem, and it implements other things like e.g. IPFS. You can’t compare that to Bromite which has a much more limited goal. Furthermore, Bromite does things of which you claim that they are improvements, when in fact they are snake oil or even counterproductive, like e.g. hiding low value info (one sticks out much more by hiding it than by showing it). Why is this better according to you? You cannot make a substantiated technical argument to support this.”
‘Cannot make a substantial technical argument?’ Nice words coming from someone who does this exact thing.
‘snake oil or even counterproductive, like e.g. hiding low value info (one sticks out much more by hiding it than by showing it’
As I said in a previous article your fingerprinting protection definition are total trash and with one Brave browser change, they would become obsolete. Well in latest Brave Browser with Chromium 91, Brave ‘again’ started hiding device name same as it did before months before, in I believe Chromium version 87, and then deciding against it(maybe they first checked how Firefox is doing it already for years in its default state), now that change has become permanent. So your definition of fingerprinting and snake oil or low value sticking out has just died. And by writing this you showed you’re lying and don’t know fully about even Brave Browser.
For Bromite latest javascript protection – I would encourage you to visit Daniel Micay twitter page and see what he has to say about latest Javascript protections, he did said something about Firefox also. So before saying anything again, first atleast read what Daniel Micay has to say. Bromite developer has a discussion about this on GitHub with someone from GrapheneOS, check that as well. And then when you read these things, burst your bubble and stop lying.
Don’t worry Brave – team browser would include those javascript protections in two years time, so sit tight.
“I am aware of the “issues” Tor cites for Chromium and none of them are insurmountable. The problem is, they expect upstream to fix it, and none of the major contributors, including Google, has a motivation to do so. That being said, Chromium is open source, so they could fix it in their downstream fork as well, it just shifts the maintenance burden for the applicable patch from Google to the Tor project. Again, Tor would significantly benefit from being based on Chromium, this would improve its web compatibility, performance, security – basically everything. And it will eventually happen anyway, after Firefox becomes even more irrelevant than it already is and web devs stop supporting it for good.”
Same old nonsense again.
“You have not presented an argument against the fact that Manifest V3 is a security improvement, because it is. It is very hard to argue against taking away the ability of extensions to directly monitor, intercept, and redirect traffic to potentially malicious destinations, isn’t it? This has nothing to do with script blocking, the extension can still hand its custom rules to the browser, it just can’t directly intercept connections anymore. You understand absolutely nothing, and this point was and is totally moot to begin with, because Brave’s adblocker is not an extension.”
In this topic alone you’ve contradicted yourself multiple times. Haven’t you read something in Mozilla blog about this?
Seriously the amount of time you’ve lied is already visible in multiple article comments and I’m not even bothered to highlight those, though by looks of it I might have to do it next time you mention Manifest V3 again.
As for script blocking and other content blocker things, since you’ve shown you have no idea and didn’t even addressed my comment properly, then no point in addressing your lies.
“Firefox was shit compared to Chrome in 2008 and it’s still playing catchup. The only technical advantage they had was gutted in 2017 when they killed bootstrapped extensions. Only bullshit ideological reasons to use it remain in 2021, and even those are purely thought out and have massive holes in them. Firefox is worse at everything: Worse security, worse web compatibility, worse performance, worse extension selection, worse web dev tools! It’s better for privacy than Chrome, but loses to Brave and other privacy-enhanced Chromium forks. And no, the shitty bandaid fix called user.js is not solving any issue, and makes especially the fingerprinting threat worse instead of better. And yet, despite all of this, you are still harping on “anticompetitive practices”, whatever that means. Is this a codeword for the incompetence of Mozilla’s devs, who introduced real site isolation in 2021, a decade after Chromium? LOL. I am done here.”
Again same old nonsense. Though what did you mean by bootstrapped extensions? Coz I can highlight your quotes about those.
“Unfortunately for you, this is exactly what it means. Bromite isn’t the miracle worker you make it out to be, sometimes I get the feeling that they do certain things to give their users a positive feeling that something was done at all, even when said something is totally pointless or even counterproductive. Like hiding the device info or network info, both of which can be found out in other ways and both of which shouldn’t be hidden because that makes you stick out more instead of less. But then we hit the wall of your lack of understanding again, because you still think that hiding info is the same as reducing your uniqueness, which is factually wrong. The opposite can be the case. Hiding info can increase your uniqueness especially when nobody else does it. You’ll never fix this misunderstanding, so I wont discuss this grotesque error of judgement of yours with you any further.”
Hiding the device info – Download latest Brave Browser and visit browserleaks.com and then report back what you find, your lies would be exposed to even you. Network Info – Bromite doesn’t do that, only Firefox does that, of course you’re more than welcome to point where I said Bromite hides network info.
And hiding info same as reducing uniqueness – I guess Brave team might visit these words as they are the one who did exactly that in their latest version.
“Our opinions on Mozilla are diametrically opposed to each other, accept that and move on.”
Unfortunately in this comment alone, you’ve shown that your opinion differs from even Brave team and Daniel Micay – the person you said I should worship.
Good job there.
“Now the only thing left is to have development of Firefox for mobile and PC to end development.”
Wow, just wow.
Firefox for android is now stable and fast, but need more addons.
@Sara A. David
If you want more add-ons, Iceraven is one option which is a close fork of Firefox which has more add-ons and custom add-ons support. Fennec and Mull Browser(other fork) doesn’t have more add-ons by default but allow Debug menu from where custom add-on collection can be enabled, so that will bring more add-ons, here is an example https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/16921559/Privacy-Add-ons/
This is the collection I made, there is also Ghacks collection if you want those add-ons and you also can create one for your specific needs.
Suggesting them to release FF Dead edition. Matches reality check 100%.