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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

11–20 of 303 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#11
post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

> Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment.

And the worst privacy story and resource handling.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#14
post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#15
I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent project.

The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#16
post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

Do people really get viruses through their browsers still? Can't think of that happening to anyone I know

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#17
I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal.

For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case."

I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#18
post #4

I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again. It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant. Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.

My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.

He stepped down himself...

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#19
post #14
post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

Not something that the average joe and jane can do.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.

He stepped down himself...

At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or get fired.
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