I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues.
The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder.
try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)
this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.
- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)
- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain
(my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).
there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management.
I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.
Yes, I am aware of bookmarks, and as someone who used to use them quite a lot, I'm aware of their limitations. Some things are just ephemeral and should remain so. Browser search is great. As you mentioned, tabs lazy load so the main functionality is the same, so it's presumptuous to assume I get no value out of my organizational strategy.
Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs.
its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows.
Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals.
You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge.
It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome.
And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops.
Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone.
The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model.
There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...
I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.
So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?
There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.
Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?
Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.
> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it
Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.
When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.
Native applications is a relatively fragmented market of different hardware and OS for platform, made more complicated by relative lack of interest (which is because the market is fragmented, a catch-22), and factors like needing to learn another programming language when you already know JavaScript and how it works on the Web, which is taught to more people every year for obvious reasons. Which is all why Github Electron, essentially a Google Chrome married to Node.js, both _JavaScript_ platforms, made such an impact when it was released. There's zero-install on the Web, too -- just follow a link and you're surfing applications. Python+Qt applications have to be installed, even if that means downloading these -- there's plenty of hosts configured to deny the user the privileges of running software they downloaded, no matter how native and how well mannered it is otherwise. There's fewer pairs of hands on the job (part of catch-22), and there's more standards and APIs to deal with, due to the fragmentation, even for all the cross-platform offerings. All this no doubt contributes to the market staying behind the juggernaut that the Web has become.
Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.
You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?
Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").
Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).
I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...
Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.
More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.
Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.
Edit:
> churning out more or less useful Web API implementations
Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
"benevolent" is an interesting word choice. I wouldn't consider them having positive intentions for users, but rather focused on financial gain and market power at any cost. Though if Apple owned would be anti non Apple customers, if most other companies owned would end up monetizing it as well but without the resources of Google. Or if government owned would remain stagnant. So not sure what the right path is.
> Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
I don't see how - it's a more than serviceable browser. The only issues I've ever had were because a webapp detected I wasn't using a browser of choice and blocked me specifically, which isn't really firefox's fault.
I guess I prefer chromium dev tools over firefox's but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I only was able to use the firefox ones.
I get the feeling this Perplexity guy is a mix of SBF the bitcoin dude with the Palantir guy but actually dreams to be early Elon, or a troll. Maybe another another deep state plant? If we really want to go that road..
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
Genuis. The ultimate way to bypass all AI bot crawling blocks. Just make every chrome browser upload whatever they view to perplexity for training data^W^WAI summarizing.
Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website.
It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0].
This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B.
You may be unaware that Google has lost an antitrust suit and that the DOJ has asked the courts to require Google sell Chrome. Whether or not Google can bribe their way out of it is yet to be seen, but they may not have a choice, so it's a pretty big one time opportunity.
This is a completely bipartisan aligned issue. Trump's administration has basically said that Biden's antitrust enforcement is the one thing they did right (in their opinion). These investigations started under Trump 1, continued under Biden, and will likely be successfully enforced under Trump 2.
There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
That’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser.
People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there.
Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue?
The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
And getting rid of Chrome is not going to stop people from choosing to go to Google. The desktop with the largest market share neither comes with Chrome nor has Google as the default search engine and people still go there.
As far as ads, there are three trillion+ market cap companies with a thriving ad business - Google, Amazon and Meta.
And the customer base is still is going to voluntarily choose to go to Google search and YouTube like they always have. That’s where the money is. Windows still has the majority of the desk to market share and Google search is not the default. Yet people still choose to use Google.
As far as Chrome itself, every single desktop OS user except for those forced to use ChromeOS went out of their way to willingly download Chrome.
And how, pray tell, where all of these people made aware of Chrome?
Google made the first ad for its front page for Chrome. This is not in itself a problem, but Google has a monopoly in search and ads. They cannot be allowed to also have a monopoly in browsers. That’s the whole point of American monopoly laws. Once you have a monopoly, you can’t do everything you want. There are limits. Owning a browser is too much power in one monopolistic giant.
So let’s say that Google doesn’t own Chrome. Does that affect where Google actually makes its money? In 2025 when most people first by a Windows computer, do they use Bing or go to Google?
Google does not have a monopoly on ads. Billions are spent on ads on Facebook properties, Amazon, Apple (app store), TikTok. People choose to use Google for search and can go to any other search engine if they choose.
In 2025, Google search is so bad more and more people are using LLM based search tools.
While the vibes around Google Search are indeed bad, the numbers haven't shown a dip in usage. And it's not like Google has rested on its laurels. They're shoving AI in search as much as they can.
This is an extremely naive take. Sundar Pichai's claim to fame was getting the Google Toolbar and Chrome pushed into the Adobe Reader installer back in the day. So many OEMs were shoving Chrome and Google into their default loads that Microsoft had to make a "Bing Edition" of Windows for a bit with a lower price to include Bing and Edge as default, and have now outright blocked the practice I believe.
When you visit Google Search or Gmail on your default browser, you get at least one but sometimes as many as three separate popups telling you to install Chrome for "faster" ability to search/email.
Today many product vendors incorrectly claim that their website or service will only work on Chrome, and refuse to provide support unless you switch to it.
Oh, and my personal favorite: If you aren't the admin of a PC, Chrome malware-installs in the user profile folder so you can circumvent your IT department!
Google's power to force Chrome on people is insane, and as the government has now determined, illegally anticompetitive.
No I am honestly terrified that the industry is that bad. Good Lord. You're telling me you've never worked somewhere which has ever complied with a bare minimum IT security policy ever? Has nobody where you work heard of defense in depth? We have built a temple to madness.
I worked at Amazon - AWS Professional Services to be exact. They trusted their employees with admin access. You had to toggle an option and click on a box saying you would be responsible with admin access.
I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth…
Every blue badge employee at Amazon as far as I know has the ability to get Admin access by clicking on a button on the home built app.
You also might be surprised that in the last 8 years since working with AWS technology, I’ve never worked at a company where I didn’t have Admin access to an AWS account. At AWS we could create as many sandbox accounts as we wanted to with Admin access and every client I have worked with for thd pass five+ years I’ve asked for a none production account with the “PowerUser” policy + iam::* permissions - which is admin in all but name.
I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider?
If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.
All I'm saying, is what you've told me is so foundationally bad that instead of being a sort of off-topic comment in this post, it should be the #1 headline on HN. I'm frankly stunned. I don't really care if I don't have enough authority to be believable to you or not, I never asked you to. But most community college professors for the IT trade degrees could explain it if you asked.
And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks would have some high buzzwordy reasons to suggest this is okay in their environment. Everyone bad at security does it.
Yes, because community college professors know the latest best practices from spending years in the industry working with large enterprises and managing employees at scale…
I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that
automatically disable disallowed apps.
When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.
anyone who spends 10 years writing performance reviews and rebuilding a service they already rebuilt last year, all to collect RSUs, was never going to land us on mars
Perplexity buying chrome would be a disaster, it just feels that way. Every vibe I got from that company is not good. They would commercialize every aspect of the browser so fast, as in insert ads everywhere. Again I just get that vibe.
"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer."
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do.
But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla.
The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens
A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it.
breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson.
bows
"
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
Hard to understand whether this is a positive or negative. Chrome is trampling the internet in favor of Google. Will Perplexity just make Chrome even worse than it is, or will they degrade Chrome's market share through incompetence? More competition in the browser space would be welcome, but I'm not optimistic.
How much of that would trickle down to the developers who worked on KHTML on which Chrome is based I wonder. They should feel pretty chuffed that their offspring has resulted in such a large valuation.
This is a troll right by Aravind? $34B is nearly double the valuation of Perplexity. I find it hard to believe so called “multiple investment funds” agreed to pony up that much cash. Kind of childish by Aravind.
But here's the thing, nobody can monetize that space as effectively as Google, except maybe Meta.
It's the same sort of confusion many people have about Google paying Apple. It's not just for the default position, it's a revenue-share for the ads seen by Apple users on Google's properties. Nobody has the same potential.
You just said the magic words, "nobody!", that's throwing the gauntlet in front of every major toxic masculine billionaire. Now Trump HAS to buy it, and show everyone. Musk HAS to buy it, just like how he showed everyone how to run Twitter. And of course, Bezos HAS to buy it to prevent them from using Chrome to destroy Amazon... Popcorn time!
I don't think any serious tech company with somewhat competent leadership would have any bit of trouble raising that much cash to buy Chrome if they had an accepted offer and ability to close.
This isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
Lol not a chance, remember that they got into browsers because that's almost the same tech for web crawling. It's a core tech for their 1T mcap company
They got into browsers to make sure all the google properties (all web based) worked really well and weren't held back by Microsoft's dead-ending of web browser development.
Not really. Google has Android first of all, and apps. So it's incorrect that all google properties are web based.
Second, web apps would work just fine on browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IExplorer.
Thinking that someone would develop a browser so that their webapps work well is missing the point entirely. If the user trusts you enough to download your application and your engineers can write code that interfaces with the OS, you would just develop an native application. Writing a browser to write your webapps would just be incredibly inefficient, and as a side effect it would help your competitors.
Google developed a javascript engine to parse webpages with javascript, then they realized they basically had a browser so voila, and that they could slap search on the search bar, so voila they published a browser.
I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues.
The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder.
try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)
this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.
- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)
- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain (my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).
there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management.
I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
Y'all are crazy. What is even the possible value in this?
Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.
Yes, I am aware of bookmarks, and as someone who used to use them quite a lot, I'm aware of their limitations. Some things are just ephemeral and should remain so. Browser search is great. As you mentioned, tabs lazy load so the main functionality is the same, so it's presumptuous to assume I get no value out of my organizational strategy.
Is there some specific reason why you are doing this? What possible benefit could this have beyond some weird bragging rights?
Because it works for me. Every now and then I tend to it and cut a couple hundred or thousand tabs I no longer need.
You seem here and in another comment to be kind evasive around the spirit of the question…which I think is more “how does this work for you?”
You choose to do it so I assume it works for you. What benefit does this give you over the more traditional bookmarking, etc?
[dead]
Yes, Chrome with ad blockers was perfect until that came along. YouTube sucks now
> What's wrong with Firefox
Speed and bugs. My Firefox crashes on some sites, like 9gag.
And it's very slow to load websites. The latest version of Chrome loads websites instantly! Firefox takes a few seconds!
I use chrome on my work machine and Firefox on my personal machine.
Haven’t ran into breaking bugs with FF (that I can remember), and I don’t notice a meaningful performance difference.
Have been using FF for probably 10-15 years now.
Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs.
its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
Ah, I can't recall the last time I uploaded an image to the web, so I guess I wouldn't run into this. Interesting if reproducible.
No bugs to report here, and I use it all the time, and heavily.
No undue burden on the system either, unlike Chrome which gets sluggish and will crash before ff.
I see no reason to abandon ff at this point.
None of these is true. Either you're lying or somthing is wrong with your PC or OS
I use FF as well and it's extremely non-performant on MacOS.
It quickly eats up much of the power usage and a number of websites (especially MS Office/365 related sites) don't render or work correctly.
The former is a FF issue, but the latter is most likely a website to website issue, as most web devs tend to optimize for the Chromium experience.
Seems like a MacOS issue rather. I've been using Firefox on Debian for 15 years and never had this issue (except a borked release here and there)
FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows.
Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals.
You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge.
It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome.
And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops.
Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone.
The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
That can’t possibly be true, Firefox uses rust and rust is blazingly fast.
I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
Ummm. You think that Google isn’t an advertising and surveillance company?
> the benevolent dictator of the web
Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model. There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...
I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.
So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?
There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.
Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?
Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.
> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it
Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.
When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.
Native applications is a relatively fragmented market of different hardware and OS for platform, made more complicated by relative lack of interest (which is because the market is fragmented, a catch-22), and factors like needing to learn another programming language when you already know JavaScript and how it works on the Web, which is taught to more people every year for obvious reasons. Which is all why Github Electron, essentially a Google Chrome married to Node.js, both _JavaScript_ platforms, made such an impact when it was released. There's zero-install on the Web, too -- just follow a link and you're surfing applications. Python+Qt applications have to be installed, even if that means downloading these -- there's plenty of hosts configured to deny the user the privileges of running software they downloaded, no matter how native and how well mannered it is otherwise. There's fewer pairs of hands on the job (part of catch-22), and there's more standards and APIs to deal with, due to the fragmentation, even for all the cross-platform offerings. All this no doubt contributes to the market staying behind the juggernaut that the Web has become.
Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.
You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?
Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").
Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).
I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...
Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.
More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.
Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.
Edit: > churning out more or less useful Web API implementations
Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
Firefox: address bar is 2px too high? Garbage.
Chrome: eavesdrops on everything? This is fine.
User priorities are what’s really broken.
What's so bad about firefox? I think it should be fine for 99% of the population.
"benevolent" is an interesting word choice. I wouldn't consider them having positive intentions for users, but rather focused on financial gain and market power at any cost. Though if Apple owned would be anti non Apple customers, if most other companies owned would end up monetizing it as well but without the resources of Google. Or if government owned would remain stagnant. So not sure what the right path is.
Firefox seems to work pretty okay
Yeah, if anything the governance model is questionable.
The browser itself is technically competitive with anything else out there.
I'm not sure I've read a comment I disagree with more on this site than this one.
Everyone in my house uses NYXT, the keyboard-driven, renderer-agnostic browser written in LISP.
> Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
I don't see how - it's a more than serviceable browser. The only issues I've ever had were because a webapp detected I wasn't using a browser of choice and blocked me specifically, which isn't really firefox's fault.
I guess I prefer chromium dev tools over firefox's but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I only was able to use the firefox ones.
> as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
but they can hire about 12 engineers for 10 years, instead of the same cost to have a single [CEO during that time period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker).
And i think 12 good engineers (at $150k/yr) for 10 years will have produced an excellent product (such as making firefox competitive with chrome...)
Of course, google, who pays mozilla the vast majority of their revemue, will have something to say about that.
Google is not benevolent
I couldn't disagree more. The problems of Google effectively controlling the “open web” take time to become evident but are starting to show.
I have no issues with them continuing to participate, but not with the level of control they have at the moment.
> We get secure browsers
Sure, if your definition of "security" doesn't include "giving users control over who the browsers are talking to".
Not much of a user-agent...
I get the feeling this Perplexity guy is a mix of SBF the bitcoin dude with the Palantir guy but actually dreams to be early Elon, or a troll. Maybe another another deep state plant? If we really want to go that road..
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
Getting similar vibe and this performative move reinforces that
He is not even a US citizen. Something seems not right.
Their CEO is trash, eff Perplexity.
Genuis. The ultimate way to bypass all AI bot crawling blocks. Just make every chrome browser upload whatever they view to perplexity for training data^W^WAI summarizing.
Also for monetizing AI Search.
Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website.
It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0].
This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B.
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-us...
exactly why Google will not accept.
They will do it for Gemini
yup. that was my point.
Also,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 ("Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome (wsj.com)"—115 comments)
Perhaps not a coincidence, $34.5B is Google's profit in 2025q1:
https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/20...
It's also the estimated monthly active users of chrome * 10.
This is clearly a PR stunt. Perplexity knows Google would not sell Chrome, it is the holy grail of their ads strategy and would cripple their moat.
You may be unaware that Google has lost an antitrust suit and that the DOJ has asked the courts to require Google sell Chrome. Whether or not Google can bribe their way out of it is yet to be seen, but they may not have a choice, so it's a pretty big one time opportunity.
Also likely a political PR stunt.
This is a completely bipartisan aligned issue. Trump's administration has basically said that Biden's antitrust enforcement is the one thing they did right (in their opinion). These investigations started under Trump 1, continued under Biden, and will likely be successfully enforced under Trump 2.
There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
Yes and the courts are idiots. Why buy Chrome when you they can get Chromium for free? What good is Chrome outside of Google?
Not to mention what does that mean for ChromeOS?
That’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser.
People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there.
Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue?
The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
You're discussing the wrong thing; Google might have to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search and ads. Not on the browser.
And getting rid of Chrome is not going to stop people from choosing to go to Google. The desktop with the largest market share neither comes with Chrome nor has Google as the default search engine and people still go there.
As far as ads, there are three trillion+ market cap companies with a thriving ad business - Google, Amazon and Meta.
The courts have, for the first time in decades, done their job. It seems ridiculous now but it should've been done ten years ago.
The impact is in removing Google's control of the customer base, not in a copy of the code.
And the customer base is still is going to voluntarily choose to go to Google search and YouTube like they always have. That’s where the money is. Windows still has the majority of the desk to market share and Google search is not the default. Yet people still choose to use Google.
As far as Chrome itself, every single desktop OS user except for those forced to use ChromeOS went out of their way to willingly download Chrome.
And how, pray tell, where all of these people made aware of Chrome?
Google made the first ad for its front page for Chrome. This is not in itself a problem, but Google has a monopoly in search and ads. They cannot be allowed to also have a monopoly in browsers. That’s the whole point of American monopoly laws. Once you have a monopoly, you can’t do everything you want. There are limits. Owning a browser is too much power in one monopolistic giant.
So let’s say that Google doesn’t own Chrome. Does that affect where Google actually makes its money? In 2025 when most people first by a Windows computer, do they use Bing or go to Google?
Google does not have a monopoly on ads. Billions are spent on ads on Facebook properties, Amazon, Apple (app store), TikTok. People choose to use Google for search and can go to any other search engine if they choose.
In 2025, Google search is so bad more and more people are using LLM based search tools.
While the vibes around Google Search are indeed bad, the numbers haven't shown a dip in usage. And it's not like Google has rested on its laurels. They're shoving AI in search as much as they can.
This is an extremely naive take. Sundar Pichai's claim to fame was getting the Google Toolbar and Chrome pushed into the Adobe Reader installer back in the day. So many OEMs were shoving Chrome and Google into their default loads that Microsoft had to make a "Bing Edition" of Windows for a bit with a lower price to include Bing and Edge as default, and have now outright blocked the practice I believe.
When you visit Google Search or Gmail on your default browser, you get at least one but sometimes as many as three separate popups telling you to install Chrome for "faster" ability to search/email.
Today many product vendors incorrectly claim that their website or service will only work on Chrome, and refuse to provide support unless you switch to it.
Oh, and my personal favorite: If you aren't the admin of a PC, Chrome malware-installs in the user profile folder so you can circumvent your IT department!
Google's power to force Chrome on people is insane, and as the government has now determined, illegally anticompetitive.
This is 2025. People who buy Windows get a Chromium based browser where Google Search is not the default yet they go to Google.
I have a Mac, don’t use Chrome or a Chromium based browser and haven’t had an issue.
And you are forced to install Chrome on Windows? Besides wouldn’t you want your applications to install without requiring admin access?
Wait, are you suggesting you don't see an issue with people being able to install a web browser on a PC they don't own?
Hopefully you are being sarcastic.
I have never in 30 years across 10 companies including one BigTech company not been trusted with admin access to my computer.
However, admins have been able to lock down computers to not allow them to install software at least since Windows NT.
No I am honestly terrified that the industry is that bad. Good Lord. You're telling me you've never worked somewhere which has ever complied with a bare minimum IT security policy ever? Has nobody where you work heard of defense in depth? We have built a temple to madness.
I worked at Amazon - AWS Professional Services to be exact. They trusted their employees with admin access. You had to toggle an option and click on a box saying you would be responsible with admin access.
I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth…
Every blue badge employee at Amazon as far as I know has the ability to get Admin access by clicking on a button on the home built app.
You also might be surprised that in the last 8 years since working with AWS technology, I’ve never worked at a company where I didn’t have Admin access to an AWS account. At AWS we could create as many sandbox accounts as we wanted to with Admin access and every client I have worked with for thd pass five+ years I’ve asked for a none production account with the “PowerUser” policy + iam::* permissions - which is admin in all but name.
> I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth…
What you're telling me is that they do not. And that every mom and pop shop IT outfit is more qualified to secure a server than Amazon is.
I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider?
If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.
All I'm saying, is what you've told me is so foundationally bad that instead of being a sort of off-topic comment in this post, it should be the #1 headline on HN. I'm frankly stunned. I don't really care if I don't have enough authority to be believable to you or not, I never asked you to. But most community college professors for the IT trade degrees could explain it if you asked.
And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks would have some high buzzwordy reasons to suggest this is okay in their environment. Everyone bad at security does it.
Yes, because community college professors know the latest best practices from spending years in the industry working with large enterprises and managing employees at scale…
I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that automatically disable disallowed apps.
When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.
> would cripple their moat.
Would end their unfair monopolistic control over the web, search, and digital advertising.
The DOJ or the FTC need to force this dismantlement.
Missing a zero here for a realistic valuation of the indisputable market leader in the most important interface of computing.
I wonder how much would Google pay to a new owner of Chrome for a default search engine deal.
With Chrome's market share? 10+ billion a year, certainly, as that would be only 3% of the ad volume.
Can google sell, then have Alphabet Holding create Chrome2 based on Chromium, ripping off Perplexity?
Jesus how the fuck does advertising make such ungodly amounts of money.
Because we spent an entire generation of the world’s most brilliant engineers on optimizing ad revenue.
Makes me sad, we could have been on Mars by now if we had decided that spaceflight was more important than social media.
anyone who spends 10 years writing performance reviews and rebuilding a service they already rebuilt last year, all to collect RSUs, was never going to land us on mars
Because if you don't pay they bury you so low you will never sell anything.
Try putting food on the table without advertising your business. How much does your employer pay for ads?
Because it works really well
You need to pay to exist
Perplexity buying chrome would be a disaster, it just feels that way. Every vibe I got from that company is not good. They would commercialize every aspect of the browser so fast, as in insert ads everywhere. Again I just get that vibe.
It’s not just vibes. It’s cold hard cash. If you pay billions for something, you have to make that money back somehow.
"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer."
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do. But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla. The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it. breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson. bows "
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
The show's been off the air too long. I needed this.
and i am off to waste time on a best of Gavin Belson compilation, thank you.
Hilarious!
Hard to understand whether this is a positive or negative. Chrome is trampling the internet in favor of Google. Will Perplexity just make Chrome even worse than it is, or will they degrade Chrome's market share through incompetence? More competition in the browser space would be welcome, but I'm not optimistic.
Financial times article: https://archive.is/dGdnj
How much of that would trickle down to the developers who worked on KHTML on which Chrome is based I wonder. They should feel pretty chuffed that their offspring has resulted in such a large valuation.
Let's look at it from the other angle, what if instead of buying it they forked it and spend 34 billion on marketing it?
- cash burning startup - no moat - dependent on third-party APIs and platforms
This is a troll right by Aravind? $34B is nearly double the valuation of Perplexity. I find it hard to believe so called “multiple investment funds” agreed to pony up that much cash. Kind of childish by Aravind.
I'm pretty sure if Google agreed, they could come up with the money. Chrome is essentially the gateway to 90% of the world on the internet.
But here's the thing, nobody can monetize that space as effectively as Google, except maybe Meta.
It's the same sort of confusion many people have about Google paying Apple. It's not just for the default position, it's a revenue-share for the ads seen by Apple users on Google's properties. Nobody has the same potential.
You just said the magic words, "nobody!", that's throwing the gauntlet in front of every major toxic masculine billionaire. Now Trump HAS to buy it, and show everyone. Musk HAS to buy it, just like how he showed everyone how to run Twitter. And of course, Bezos HAS to buy it to prevent them from using Chrome to destroy Amazon... Popcorn time!
If Google agreed to just $34B, getting the cash would be so straightforward that even many random Joes on the street would be able to figure it out
I don't think any serious tech company with somewhat competent leadership would have any bit of trouble raising that much cash to buy Chrome if they had an accepted offer and ability to close.
Perplexing indeed
Lol, a lot of Google's $1t+ valuation is due to Chrome, $34b is a joke (to Google).
I had no idea there was a new season of Silicon Valley.
Don't feed the attention troll
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656
This isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
PR stunt. Now we are all participating.
Funding secured!
Lol not a chance, remember that they got into browsers because that's almost the same tech for web crawling. It's a core tech for their 1T mcap company
They got into browsers to make sure all the google properties (all web based) worked really well and weren't held back by Microsoft's dead-ending of web browser development.
And also to prevent (or at least delay) the app-ification of the web, because apps are not searchable.
Yes!
Not really. Google has Android first of all, and apps. So it's incorrect that all google properties are web based.
Second, web apps would work just fine on browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IExplorer.
Thinking that someone would develop a browser so that their webapps work well is missing the point entirely. If the user trusts you enough to download your application and your engineers can write code that interfaces with the OS, you would just develop an native application. Writing a browser to write your webapps would just be incredibly inefficient, and as a side effect it would help your competitors.
Google developed a javascript engine to parse webpages with javascript, then they realized they basically had a browser so voila, and that they could slap search on the search bar, so voila they published a browser.
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