Hot Take Firefox shares roadmap as it loses users at an alarming rate

No one cares mate, no one besides tech folk know what MV2 is let alone what MV3 restricts. Most people don't care sadly, people just accept ads & tracking.
Sad but true, for almost a decade I couldn't convince my family members to switch from Google Chrome to other browsers, so how could I convince anyone else? Even no one of them told me that uBlock Origin MV2 extension had stopped working on their browsers so I could find them an alternative. They simply accept the ads and tracking.
 
While it's true that the entire project is open source, maintaining a web browser is serious work, especially when a company abandons the project.
...

chances of free-time developers maintaining 30-32 million lines of code, it being stable and without security risks are the tinniest.
I use Firefox, and it’s more or less “Till death due us part.” I sort of agree that $200–$250M of probable software development expense isn’t going to be replaced by independent developers providing a free service. You’d need a serious entity behind it.
 
No one cares mate, no one besides tech folk know what MV2 is let alone what MV3 restricts. Most people don't care sadly, people just accept ads & tracking.
I think people do care, they simply don't know how to set it up correctly and are afraid they'll mess something up. I had numerous people asking me to get rid of the ads on their phones at work. Not just for YouTube but also for browsing the web.
Even when they don't, Ghostery and Adguard MV3 extensions work just fine on all chromium browsers. I don't understand why people keep preaching Firefox + Ublock Origin as the only solution these days.
Because while they may remove simple ads, they can't remove complex ads which are injected through JavaScript and need advanced scriptlets. They also struggle a lot with those anti-adblock messages. There's no element picker so if there are ads or placeholders that aren't blocked, you can't block them manually. Then there's control argument as uBlock Origin in Firefox gives you absolute control what will load and what won't.

Simply said, if you want to block ads more efficiently and proactively, you have no other options than to use Firefox + uBlock Origin (or Brave).
Sad but true, for almost a decade I couldn't convince my family members to switch from Google Chrome to other browsers, so how could I convince anyone else? Even no one of them told me that uBlock Origin MV2 extension had stopped working on their browsers so I could find them an alternative. They simply accept the ads and tracking.
Oh, they will change their minds once ads become intolerable. My parents were never bothered by ads, until YouTube started implementing them more aggressively as well as news portals they visit. They aren't using PCs though, just phones.
 
Even when they don't, Ghostery and Adguard MV3 extensions work just fine on all chromium browsers. I don't understand why people keep preaching Firefox + Ublock Origin as the only solution these days.
I don't see how Firefox + forks can be the only choice because if you use Windows Edge is there, always, (unless you have powers!) I feel FF is an alternative, a good alternative, of course we all have choices & I for one totally understand others feelings & choices.
 
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Even when they don't, Ghostery and Adguard MV3 extensions work just fine on all chromium browsers. I don't understand why people keep preaching Firefox + Ublock Origin as the only solution these days.
And even uBlock Dynamic filtering works fine under Mv3, also uMatrix functionality can be recreated under Mv3 limitations.

Mv3 when announced is not the same as it is now.
 
Even if Mozilla abandons Firefox, the code is open source, and those who hate Google and Microsoft (and they are growing in number) will take the code and revive Firefox once again, just like the phoenix, rising from its ashes.
They will continue to maintain it until the code becomes obsolete. Without Google, Firefox would not exist.
 
Firefox is Less Secure than Chromium ( Anthropic Opus 5's opinion )

Process granularity. Chromium separates functionality into more processes, each of which can be independently confined. Chromium's multi-process architecture is significantly more mature and granular than Firefox's, allowing tighter restrictions on each component; where Firefox lacks a dedicated process, that functionality is merged into the parent or content process, making strong restrictions considerably harder to enforce.

Syscall filtering. This criticism has not aged out and is the most important one. Firefox's seccomp-bpf filter is substantially less restrictive than Chromium's and does not restrict anywhere near the same number of syscalls or their arguments — for example, ioctl filtering in the content process blocks only TTY-related calls, leaving a very large kernel attack surface exposed through a syscall comprising hundreds of distinct interfaces. For a sandbox escape, kernel attack surface is the currency. This is the single largest concrete difference.

Site isolation. Firefox's Fission is a genuine per-site process model, but it is younger and leakier than Chromium's. Fission remains less mature than Chromium's site isolation, and cross-site leaks have allowed a compromised content process to reach another's data and bypass isolation. That criticism remains live in 2026: CVE-2026-15719, patched in Firefox 152.0.6 with public exploit code already circulating, was a flaw in how DOM navigation enforces the cross-process boundary, potentially allowing a compromised renderer to reach content in another tab's process — a structural defeat of the isolation architecture rather than an ordinary memory bug.

The recent "Firefox caught up" claim. You may encounter a January 2026 discussion citing a jump in Firefox's sandbox restriction level. That work is Windows-only, and knowledgeable commenters were explicit that it does not change the Linux or Android picture, and that unfixed site-isolation leaks and separate exploit-mitigation gaps remain regardless.

Snap-packaged browsers get a generated AppArmor profile at runtime that permits user namespaces, so the snap Firefox on Ubuntu is confined by snapd's AppArmor policy in addition to Firefox's internal sandbox. That external layer partially compensates for the weaker internal one
 
Firefox is Less Secure than Brave ( ChatGPT paid's answer )

Ubuntu/Linux: Brave vs Firefox

For resistance to an actual browser exploit, I would choose Brave over Firefox on Linux.

Both are well sandboxed. Both have site isolation. Both use Linux seccomp/namespaces. And if you use their Snap packages, both receive an additional Ubuntu confinement boundary.

But Chromium/Brave has the stronger overall browser security architecture, particularly its very mature renderer sandbox + Site Isolation model, where the privileged browser process treats a renderer as potentially compromised and restricts what site data that renderer may receive. Chromium explicitly designed Site Isolation to protect even against a fully compromised renderer.

So for your dmz-pwn-test machine, I'd rank them approximately:

Brave Snap > Firefox Snap > Firefox/Brave without additional OS confinement, with the exact ordering of the latter two depending on packaging and configuration.

The difference between Brave Snap and Firefox Snap isn't enormous, because Firefox's Linux sandbox is quite real and Snap adds another serious containment layer. But if the question is strictly:

Which browser would I rather expose to deliberately hostile web content on Ubuntu?

Brave Snap.
 
Due to Laziness, I let AI do the research. But I Trust Antrhopic's AI more om security matters ( due to its Mythos fame ) It shows security insight, whereas ChatGPT does cursory investigation. And when I mention Antropic's arguments, ChatGPT sort of goes: oh yeah, and that, I'll revise my opinion. Twice in the same session.
 
@Victor M Be careful about trusting AI. Majority of answers it gets from Reddit where people post garbage all the time. You really should do the research yourself and then see if the AI agrees with you. Otherwise AI could give you false info, and by posting it here, your only spreading it with a chance of AI picking the false information again.

On one side having Chromium fanboys saying it's the best, on other Gecko fanboys saying it's the best doesn't play nice with AI, as it will take any reason as a plus or a minus. You can post "Brave is the most secure because the sky is blue" and AI would add that as a plus.

Asking which web browser is the most secure is like asking what antivirus is the best in protection. There's no best; they are all pretty much equal. But I'm personally giving Firefox slight advantage due to smaller number of users as hackers tend to attack more popular software the most.
 
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@Marko :) Nah, Athropic cites Madaidan, privacyguides and Profincognito, not Reddit. I asked it to produce citations. It even shows which arguments are dated. AI is improving all the time.

I didn't ask Anthropic which browser is most secure. I asked it to compare security of Chromium and Firefox. And I gave it context: I am using the info for a dmz pwn test.

Then I pick Brave which is Chrome based, and asked ChatGPT the similar question.
 
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I am not just flooding the forum with nonsense, I am giving you what the paid versions produces. And Anthropic gives more detail. It didn't claim Brave is better, it gave me some caveat about Brave on Ubuntu. The Claim is My understanding and conclusion, I wasn't clear about that.
 
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My coding years are behind me. Nowadays I use ChatGPT mostly for coding. And I am not asking just for 3 liner's. And ChatGPT is reasonably good at it. May current project runs at almost 1600 lines of code. It sometimes produces mistakes, and I have to give it the error messages and feedback, but it gets the job done. Without it I would have to learn new languages which would take months. And then learn Linux specifics which would require god knows how long.
 
My coding years are behind me. Nowadays I use ChatGPT mostly for coding. And I am not asking just for 3 liner's. And ChatGPT is reasonably good at it. May current project runs at almost 1600 lines of code. It sometimes produces mistakes, and I have to give it the error messages and feedback, but it gets the job done. Without it I would have to learn new languages which would take months. And then learn Linux specifics which would requires god knows how long.

It's a great resource, isn't it. And for my general use, I would have a hard time giving up Gemini Plus that has helped me with so many questions, with its ability to read and analyze images I often submit to it to help clear things up, or dial things in for its responses.
 
The most significant limitation of an MV3 ad blocker is adflickers.

I don’t think any of you who use uBlock Origin Lite or Ghostery,just to give two examples,have never seen an adflicker on a web page.

Well, keep in mind that adflickers are ads and have the advantage of being visible, even if only for a brief moment.

The same problem exists with trackers.
Although this problem is more insidious because it’s invisible to the naked eye.

uBlock Stripped — Dynamic Filtering has certainly reduced these two problems to a level that, while not exactly zero, is very close to zero, because its developer has enhanced certain aspects of the extension that were overlooked in the ad blockers I mentioned above.