YHK - yet another hacker news clone

All in all good thing, why are they so mad.

(Regardless of one's feelings about generative AI, I think some features like local translation or alt text are too nice to be labeled "LLM shit", but I admit I am biased)

Like a rich kid living on daddy's money, they're somewhat disconnected from the reality that most people exist in.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/phasing-out-the-o...

I agree with the other person though that you should install uBlock Origin in Firefox (which works better there than in Chromium based browsers) and never look back.

It takes literally two seconds to install uBlock Origin.

You can even preload it by baking in the xpi file.

https://librewolf.net/

It is a Firefox fork with sane, user-respecting defaults. Of course it breaks sites that do not respect their users' privacy / agency.

https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#extensions

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Deploying-uBlock-Orig...

The question is: how is that goal turning out once it meets reality?

Tons of great ideas failed for various reasons. Alan Kay keeps on pointing out how sad he is that Xerox PARC failed in many ways. Reality is a strong selector - and the evil Google empire will make competition really, really hard here.

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

If company IT gets hold of Firefox, it's not better than just using Edge or Chrome that comes by default.

You'll still likely need to push something like an enrollment token for Chrome (ex: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9301891 ), but then the rest is done through the Firefox Enterprise console.

It looks like they do actually offer that as a feature: "Employees can access internal company sites and web apps from personal devices without a device-level VPN"

Edit: To give proper credit, the link is from Heise.de

[Edited: typo]

My anec-data on the subject seems to imply it affects a very specific segment of people: The "I only use a (usually Windows) computer at work" folks. The odd part of that is that almost all of them seem to own iPhones or iPads (specifically not Android devices) and since they use these devices, exclusively, outside of work and one can assume they're probably opening Safari for browsing, why do they have such a strong association that Chrome must be "the browser." This segment, though, seems to make up a large majority of "knowledge workers" outside of IT.

Now, like probably a lot of us here, I'm the tech support for everyone who knows I "play with computers professionally." One of the first things I do is remove the Chrome and Edge icon from the task bar[0] and add Firefox with a small set of extensions that generally keep me from having to revisit them due to malware. I usually just tell them "The button you use to get on the Internet changed but it's the same." ... and Bob's your uncle. I return a year later, the same Firefox icon is in the same place, updated several versions and all is well. They all vaguely knew they were using something different before, some knew it was called Chrome or Edge, but "the icon changed" is all I've had to say for probably a decade since the two browsers' core functionality is close enough that they generally cover every site the older generation would be expected to visit.

It feels like a variation of "they've got enough knowledge to be dangerous."

[0] I don't think I've ever seen my parents, aunts/uncles, extended older family every try to find a program through that menu that pops up when you click the button that used to be called the "Start" button. :)

Mozilla might have anticipated this when they wrote "Diversify your browser engine" as one of the selling points.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/enterprise/firefox-enterprise/...

Diversification is a good idea, personally I use both Chrome and Firefox every day (and sometimes Lynx).

They lost fierefox a few months ago due to new compamy policy and with it lost access to some apps when working from home. We know it is related to the proxy config but company is so big and processes are such a mess nobody knows who should be contacted and by which email alias or service now ticket.

This is what the Island browser does - you can't log into any company resource unless you do so from the authorized browser.

This type of dysfunction occurs quite frequently i find.

I wouldn't be surprised if those people had some techie in their life advising similar! and/or, they just really want decent adblock tech.

Why?

This one sounds new to me.

Some settings are flat out refused (for "security reasons"). And with each new update there are a few new popups / invitations to try this new feature / re-enabling the v2 of the thing of which the v1 was already opted out in the policy. And it seems like you cannot apply new policy while the browser is running - meaning it cannot be used to roll out hotfixes without interrupting the work of currently unaffected workstations.

And then there is the syncing. If you want to manage & sync history, bookmarks and the password managers content.. you are probably going to find that easier by overriding the builtin features with 3rd-party extensions, as the builtin sync feature is very much tailored to the needs of privately owned devices and one-device-at-a-time usage patterns.

Edit: "website filtering" too

I think we hit all the features you mention but not sure about the above.

This is where it should have been done in the first place instead of breaking TLS and creating enormous risks when that corporate MITM private key goes for a walk.

I think that these DLP/content inspection solutions should not be preferred as a first line or blanket solution because they are inherently risky and can easily be deployed wrong. Not to mention creating big privacy and security risks for users, such as when someone wants to check their bank balance from their work machine.

But in cases where there is a clear benefit when dealing with highly sensitive information, doing this inspection right in the browser is the least worst option from a security perspective when it is correctly integrated with the browser and not hacked on.

Warning (instead of blocking) is possible. Due to the security logging (plus, if wanted, SIEM integration) you get the flagging.

Can you run data through a local or corporately-situated LLM instructed to "Assess whether this looks potentially sensitive" via a given set of rules, and flag it to the user or a supervisor to proceed/abort?

Not in the first version, but this is an area we are working in.

what kind of hooks and feedback/UI interaction is available for third party integrations?

We support the standard SDK for this which is also used by Chromium based products:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/03/improving-firefox-stabilit...

That's how Trellix and Broadcom integrate with it as well.

Managing browsers - portals to almost every use and risk - is a PITA and I don't trust Chrome for confidentiality of data or users. Access to actual Mozilla personnel (engineers?) would be a big differentiator. But I wonder about a couple of things:

1) What are Edge and Safari management like? Are they competition here? If IT wants to move off Chrome to a management-friendly browser, the first thought would be the platform's native browsers which might integrate easily with native management.

2) How well does Firefox's management solution work? One-off management solutions for single applications have a bad history: They are often buggy, poorly designed (how much is Mozilla investing in UI design for this small number of users), complicated to learn, deploy (is this some sort of client-server? require another app client-side?), operate (what about WAN users? intermittent connections?), have poor features (multiple profiles? per-user or per-device? multiple users per device and multiple devices per user? group management? integration with other directory services - or do they reinvent the wheel and I need to input every update in multiple applications? multiple platforms? mobile apps?), manage (the management app needs management), etc. Does it reliably autodeploy or do I need to manually do something for each of my 10,000 users? Again, how much will Mozilla invest in this small group of users, the IT admins? I already have Microsoft's / Apple's native platform management solutions and those are enough of a headache.

I'd advise Mozilla to make it a delight for IT admins - immediately remove their fears of an additional headache in their busy days - and they will jump right in. As long as it works, I don't think users would care. Everyone, users and admins, is too busy.

This sounds like what someone called a self-licking ice cream cone. Make the web so complicated and unstable that you need a stupendously expensive browser development project releasing constant updates/upgrades. The alternative left behind was having a stable and not too fancy set of web standards, say basically HTML3, and then you wouldn't need a gigantic expensive bureaucracy to write a browser.

This is simplistic and almost certainly leads to overblocking.

Blocking a gambling domain sounds innocent on the surface but what if the gambling company publishes an article in their corporate blog to share how they solved a specific scaling problem or what money data modelling lessons they've learned?

It has happened to me more than once that I tried to read an article that was immediately relevant to my work but was denied access due to naive domain overblocking.

Please stop normalizing this shit.

Having an offering in this space would be one of the most sensible decisions the Mozilla Foundation has made in recent history.