Firefox is a legitimate alternative, it works for >99% of the world's websites and is an actual alternative i.e. not a clone of Chrome. I've been using it for nearly the last 5 years full-time and have never needed to open Chrome. I am not sure how one can pretend otherwise, so no, I don't think just saying it's "bad" and ignoring it as an alternative is viable.
Do some Google websites perform worse on Firefox? Sure, but the entire reason that's because people don't use Firefox enough i.e. some websites are worse on Firefox. You just go around and around. If the audience of HN is not able to make that sacrifice (not use some of the GOOG's website) then we deserve the monopoly of Chrome.
Other than that, I also think we need a third alternative for Browsers. Ladybird is in the news these days, and if you're a dev and care about this issue, we should all be contributing to it.
I agree about your clone comment ala Brave, and so on.
> If the audience of HN is not able to make that sacrifice (not use some of the GOOG's website) then we deserve the monopoly of Chrome.
The audience of HN is unlikely to make a difference here.
Besides, we are not some political party who all need to vote in one way together. Each person individually here makes their own choices.
Personally I think making my life harder with pointless sacrifices is not useful. I ask myself, am I making this sacrifice to make myself feel good, or because I actually think it can make a change? In this case, I don't think it would make any difference and it wouldn't make me feel good so there's no utility in using Firefox, for me.
This subject - browser monopoly, and related things like OS or app store monopoly - needs to be tackled with regulation, not personal sacrifices.
> The audience of HN is unlikely to make a difference here.
The audience of HN and devs in large, are the ones who've contributed to the monopoly of Chrome. Us only testing and creating applications for Chrome led to this.
I never said that people don't make their own choice. Of course they do. My point was that if we are going to complain about Chrome, then Firefox is a perfectly fine alternative and is currently the best way to change GOOG's ways is by voting with our feet.
Would regulation be nice? Sure. I doubt it's coming though so for the moment, our only alternative to not living in a ad-infested hellscape is to use Firefox.
no bc they are leveraging monopoly in search to advantage their other products and undermine competition.
im a relatively happy firefox user, but at this point to say mozilla significantly mitigates googles monopoly is as plausible as when microsoft claimed that BeOS somehow mitigated theirs.
