Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve been running Firefox for quite some time and part of that journey has been subscribing to the Firefox subreddit on Reddit – reading through many of the posts one of the posts bought up an interesting question regarding non-Google related reasons why you have chosen Firefox over the alternatives. Funny enough for me my preference for Firefox had less to do with Google and more to do with my experience with Safari and it’s limited extensions framework resulting in even some of the best content blockers doing a less than stellar job when compared to what can be run on Firefox. In the process of making the extensions framework more secure (claim made by Google who sparked off the whole MV3 development) the result has crippled the ability for extension developers to have low level access to the browser which enabled MV2 based content blockers to be more effective than MV3 based content blockers.

For me it isn’t an anti-Google play given that I love using Google services such as Workspace, Android, ChromeOS and many other features. For me, it comes down to Google crippling their browser and me deciding that Chrome no longer suits my needs. The great thing with Google is that unlike Microsoft I don’t have any issues using any of their services with Firefox – I’m not given a warning in the case of Microsoft Skype that by using Firefox that I’m going to be given an inferior experience because I don’t want to use a Chromium based browser or Safari. The impression I get with Google vs Microsoft is that Google doesn’t care how you access their services as long as you’re accessing them where as with Microsoft they’re still holding onto hold habits.

The recent posts on the subreddit seem to be all focused around Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) (link) where people are whipping themselves into a frenzy as if it were the end of the world wile ignoring that Apple also has something similar (link) and Google’s on going attempt to walk a tight rope between providing useful information to advertisers while preserving anonymity. All of these solutions working towards a replacement for third party cookies whose support are either have been phased out or being phased out. What do I think? I think that the three major web browsers need to come together and agree on a single way of tackling this issue rather than each of them doing their own thing – it appears that the tech dude bros are doomed to repeat past mistakes by failing to learn from history.