I'd like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Technology
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i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing
When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.
Switch? I never left!
I deeply regret leaving.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I had a similar history to you.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
- switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
- switched Google Search Engine to searxng
- switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
- switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
- switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
- switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there's not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple's browser engine.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010's
Apple might be the one company that is even worse than Google
PWAs ?
This extension does a decent job.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/
But yeah it would be nice for Firefox to support PWAs natively.
Thanks. I must still try it in Zen Browser
Firefox kind of sucks in android though and there are no good forks imo, but this is also true for chromium so idk what to do.
Cromite is a hardened chromium fork, replaced Bromite last year.
For some reason I can't get my Firefox app to actually activate dark mode on my phone. I switch it in the settings and refresh it but it just won't work so I keep using chrome. Any ideas?
Mozilla Foundation fronts Mozilla Corporation which is for-profit and brings in nearly a Billion in revenue.
Don't donate, do harden it.
It was never a good time to switch to Chrome.
When it was released, Chrome was revolutionary. Sandboxing individual tabs into their own processes was a stroke of genius. Until then, if a single site ate up all your memory and crashed your browser, all your tabs/sites died and you had to start again.
It really was the best browser for a hot minute before others copied the idea.
Totally agree. I also knew this was Google's modus operandi. The early versions of their software can be amazing and they slowly monetize over time.
I never understood why so many people thought it was a good idea to hand Google the near monopoly power we had just prevented Microsoft in keeping. And that was AFTER we saw how bad it was that Microsoft had that power.
Too many people go for short term gain for way greater long term losses.
Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they're similar now.
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The best time to switch to Firefox was 19 years ago when it first came into existence. The 2nd best time is now.
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It's amazing to me that all browsers don't have this style of tabs.
I'm not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don't see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it's really nice. Most of the time you're opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.
Specifically any job over the phone, it's almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
Don't get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don't last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that's a sign they should be cleaned up.
On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.
It's getting more and more like chrome.
I might be in the very minority crowd here, but I just can't get used to Firefox. I mean once upon a time I was clinging to Netscape screaming foul at Internet Explorer too, old habits die hard. But Chrome just clicks for me, whereas the multiple times I've tried Firefox, it just doesn't click for me. Can't put my finger on it.
I've been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn't perfect but it's better than using a browser made by a company that is actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, https://astro.build/ Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
Personally I've never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I'm happy it's still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.
Switched back in the summer for good. Use Firefox in my android as the default browser with DuckDuckGo as search engine. The issue is still relying on the android digital hemisphere as the default OS for my phone.
Edit : The only thing lacking is tab management. I know there is an extension. But it doesn't satisfy.
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can't go back.
Have they addressed the security issues with sandboxing and site isolation and added a web view on android yet? I'd love to use Firefox on my phone too, but those issues were big enough for GrapheneOS to recommend against gecko-based browsers (though fortunately they provide their own de-googled chromium-based browser Vanadium):
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I love GrapheneOS and they tried everything to make Chromium less shitty, but Vanadium still lacks fingerprinting protection as well as support for ad blocking. That's why I use Mull, a hardened fork of Firefox, for everything except banking.
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
Earlier, I tried Google Chrome's "profiles" but damn, how inconvenient they are. I ended up opening multiple windows.
Firefox, on the other hand, only uses a single window for multiple tab containers and accounts.
which add on do you use?
I use Facebook Container which isolates any webpage that connects with facebook from the rest of my tabs. It also has separate containers for things like work, shopping, etc you can optionally use for whatever.
It's very convenient to just open a "shopping" container tab to check my spam email address instead of opening a private window and needing to sign in each time.
Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons.
Also built in spyware and a LOT of snitching to a 3rd party analytics company that can be disable in flags.
If you're serious about privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium if you're reasons that required the Chromium dev tools.
Don't forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
This is the first I'm seeing it, and it looks interesting. I'm always up to try a new browser. And it works on Linux too. If the language can be toggled to English I'll definitely try it.
Their website is in Japanese but everything in the browser itself was English by default when I started using it!
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