It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was re…
and i kinda agree with them; i hate the chromium monopoly but i’ve been using vivaldi more precisely because it was european based (aside from the uplink chromium) and the fact they’ve taken a hardline stance against adding ai features. being able to add filterlists to the build in blocker is nice too.
and this is from someone who has loved mozilla since netscape days and has used firefox since it was firebird.
I have been on Firefox since it was called Mosaic*. I changed to Vivaldi because they actually have a shit of features I use and like. But then Google said, “no ublock for u!”, so I said, “fuck u, no customer for u!” and went back to Firefox.
It’s literally the one reason I use FF. Because I’m old and get the FUCK off my lawn.
I’ve been using various Firefox forks occasionally since before it was cool and that’s still a respectable choice in my opinion. I still cling to the faint hope that maybe Google will not be in exclusive control of web standards but it might be pointless if everyone is ready to hop on the hip chromium skin of the month every time Mozilla corp does something stupid and out of touch. Manifest v3 should have been a much bigger wake-up call for the privacy minded chromium user, but I guess people are satisfied as long as Google lets them block most ads if they feel like allowing it.
As I understand it, there were genuine security reasons for Manifest v3. Browser extensions are a great vector for malware and under manifest v2 it was very easy to sneakily distribute that malware … or something.
Honestly I didn’t look into it that much because I’d use Firefox either way.
they kinda already had a followup piece here; https://hackaday.com/2025/04/07/which-browser-should-i-use-in-2025/ which points to vivaldi and librewolf
and i kinda agree with them; i hate the chromium monopoly but i’ve been using vivaldi more precisely because it was european based (aside from the uplink chromium) and the fact they’ve taken a hardline stance against adding ai features. being able to add filterlists to the build in blocker is nice too.
and this is from someone who has loved mozilla since netscape days and has used firefox since it was firebird.
I have been on Firefox since it was called Mosaic*. I changed to Vivaldi because they actually have a shit of features I use and like. But then Google said, “no ublock for u!”, so I said, “fuck u, no customer for u!” and went back to Firefox.
It’s literally the one reason I use FF. Because I’m old and get the FUCK off my lawn.
* it had a swirling thing
i have ublock origin but also within vivaldi:settings/privacy, you can click manage sources and add your own tracker and blocking filter lists too.
Hmm.
Mah ninja.
Thanks for the tip!
I’ve been using various Firefox forks occasionally since before it was cool and that’s still a respectable choice in my opinion. I still cling to the faint hope that maybe Google will not be in exclusive control of web standards but it might be pointless if everyone is ready to hop on the hip chromium skin of the month every time Mozilla corp does something stupid and out of touch. Manifest v3 should have been a much bigger wake-up call for the privacy minded chromium user, but I guess people are satisfied as long as Google lets them block most ads if they feel like allowing it.
As I understand it, there were genuine security reasons for Manifest v3. Browser extensions are a great vector for malware and under manifest v2 it was very easy to sneakily distribute that malware … or something.
Honestly I didn’t look into it that much because I’d use Firefox either way.