Some people have hard times to understand that Chromium is better than Gecko, in fact, the only positive things about Gecko is UI customization and some people would say “containers”, but if people stopped thinking about silly stuff, they would understand how Chromium has made things better than Mozilla.
For example, Mozilla has always done and awkward job when it comes to implement features, for example, Profiles support in Chromium has always been okay sharing resources and keeping things clean, while in Firefox each profile is loaded as a new instance of the browser multiplying the resource usage.
But if people just check Chrome status page, they would understand the many things Chromes adds, I am talking about APIs web devs can use and they are great additions, while Mozilla can barely keep up with existing standards like when they took months to bring :has() support.
Or compare something like using Document picture-in-picture which is used in Tiktok vs not having document-pip, while not a web standard, it gives something to Chromium users Gecko can’t have unless they add it, and even if Mozilla is slowly improving something like adding tab groups, but Chromium already had all the advantage that there is synchronization between mobile and desktop, so for Mozilla to reach that parity is going to take a while.
But people forget Mozilla uses a lot of Chromium implementations, regex, widevine, webextensions, safe browsing… so Chromium has shaped things around even indirectly, so it is crazy how people get triggered but pretend Mozilla has been 100% true independent alternative.
But it is easy to see the weird contradictions when people praise Firefox as ‘private’, yet, they never bothered with a native Adblocker, their excuses are that there are extensions and devs, and since mobile can use extensions then everything is fine, but that’s mediocre mentality, because Firefox mobile is not great, and they just don’t want to hire people who will deal with web compat for having an adblocker until they can do what Brave does, add features until 99.9% of uBlock lists work, currently Brave is missing some rule support, few important rules, but Brave is a smaller company than Mozilla, and Mozilla gets millions from google for their search deal, making it a dumb excuse not to implement a native adblocker only because extensions exist, that’s just not wanting to do the job and just release the Tracking Protection Lists which is limited.
Not just Brave, I was testing Vivaldi’s adblocker yesterday, and now it finally got ABP parity minus the Procedural Cosmetic Filters, but ABP Snippets can do the job, since it has “hide if contains” and stuff like that, so you can hide just the same as a Procedural Filtering.
Of course, I doubt Vivaldi developers understand adblocking at the rules level, and want to hire someone that can make compatibility happen.
Vivaldi based their Adblocker on ABP, which is the problem since less features and less resources/scriptlets than uBlock, but it works if done right
Brave’s adblocker is just better made and more native with rust language, but that can cause some limitations in some ways. But for example, Brave for using uBlock resources can add extension functionality that modify web content natively, easily get userscripts and without or too much modification get SponsorBlock, ReturnDislikeButton without the need of an extension (yes, even on Android).
Desktop already supports Developer mode to easily add Scriptlets too, so eventually mobile will get that feature so no need for long Adblock rules to add SponsorBlock or ReturnDislikeButton in Youtube, or twitch with FFZ and BTTV (not supported in mobile but TwitchTheaterTV works fine with both scriptlets/userscripts), and then with this power of injecting any JS people want and not being limited to be ABP dependant like Vivaldi, is the reason why Brave is the best browser today.
But the real question is how small small companies like Vivaldi and Brave can do it, but not Firefox? they just don’t care and think extensions, which can cause performance issues are the best alternative, while getting millions for doing nothing.
So yes, In the end, it is better if Linux people start realizing using Firefox as default is not the best future, not even Brave, whose started as a Gecko fork and whose CEO worked with Mozilla for so many years decided to stick with it, and he still doesn’t even regret it.
I currently use (not much, because I use Windows and like Windows) RefreshOS which has Brave as default, and there is also Biglinux, so few ones have done some difference and not the usual Firefox everywhere, which I know works better, so I hope this support brings better things for Linux users (not me, but I have sympathy for people who chose to go away from Windows)
