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It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#61
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What's wrong with Quantum?

On Mac at least, basic UI like hover highlighting is extremely slow. Obviously everyone's environment, use case, and experiences are different. For me, personally, Quantum is not even in the same league as Chrome or Safari. (Also, for me, personally, I think downvoting people who have differing experiences is less than productive.)

Nothing wrong with having a different opinion, and this is useful critique! No complaints here, however your original comment lacked this information. It's being downvoted because it doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion. If you'd included this extra tidbit originally, I think it would have been fine.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#62
> If I were committed to using only iPhones, iPads, and Macs for the rest of my tech life, I might still be on Safari. Its performance is great on both iOS and macOS... and it offers a choice of ad blockers among a reasonable selection of browser extensions.

> But I’m writing this in Firefox today for a very simple reason: cross-platform compatibility.... I need a browser that knows me as well on a Huawei smartphone or Lenovo ThinkPad as it understands me an on iPhone X.

Summary: Safari is actually great. Use Firefox if you use non-Apple devices.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#63

I never left FF. It's been a great browser for me and I've never been tempted to leave. Recently though since the big update that rendered half the add-ons I came to rely on useless - I'm in limbo with no alternatives to them or half-hearted promises that the dev will get round to porting them "sometime". Chrome has a lot of them as well as alternatives available and for me this is where I do consider jumping ship. I…

Yes. It broke many add-ons that were important to me. I'm hanging in there doing my usuals with the 52 ESR version, although it has broken a half-dozen of them. Many of the Quantum 'replacements' have been severely restricted in functionality.

Unless the situation improves, when the ESR expires, I'll be switching to FF forks permanently. E.g. Pale Moon. And there are others in the works, like Waterfox.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#64
post #47
post #38

Here's my favorite metaphor to explain Chrome and Firefox. So, imagine you have two cars to chose from. The first car, called Chrome, is really cool - it's quick, it's nice, it's reliable, it's comfortable. There's just one thing. There's a guy on the back seat. He's always there. He writes down wherever you're going. When you go shopping, he makes a copy of the receipt. When you drive with someone, he listens to the…

With respect to your analogy: What of Chromium [with the right settings switched in the user's favour]?

Switching off Chrome is like "voting with your wallet", because you're increasing the market share of another entity / project, increasing its legitimacy in the eyes of your friends and colleagues or in the stats that all major websites are collecting on browsers.

But switching to Chromium does none of that.

Also stripping Google's integration out of Chromium leaves you with a much less capable browser. Are you, for example, willing to use Chromium without Google's Chrome Web Store?

I don't think so. But say that you're willing to keep using Google's Chrome Web Store, Chromium is open source, but the Chrome Web Store is not and all those extensions, reviews and users can't be moved, so what will happen if Google decides to disallow access to its store to Chromium users?

If you think that can't happen, consider that they did it for AOSP Android and that alternatives to Google Play might as well not exist ;-)

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If you're worried about Google's control of Chrome, switching to Chromium does nothing useful, the project is still under Google's control, you're still depending on their good will and you're doing nothing to diminish Chrome's dominance of the market.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#67

I have been using Firefox since it was called Firebird. Off late one of the reasons, adoption isn't climbing is because Firefox is not included as one of the supported let alone allowed pieces of software in corporate companies. At my last company, security guys went as far as to classify Firefox a risk. They instructed Desktop Support to remotely uninstall Firefox off users machines. Most people I support would rath…

Why did your security classify Firefox as a risk?

It was just after WannaCry was big news. They had installed some Blucoat or something along those lines. I think Firefox didn't play so nice with the monitoring software hence it was classified a risk. I have to add that the Security Director wasn't a security expert, highly ambitious and was never going to entertain anything he didn't understand.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#68

I mean...Firefox is completely rewritten from the ground up in Rust, a language invented by Mozilla because they rock and they're absolutely killing it. Given that it's the browser with the latest full bore rewrite, shouldn't we expect it to be the coolest atm?

It's not a full rewrite, but many core parts have been rewritten. (Possibly most notably the UI).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#69
post #38

Here's my favorite metaphor to explain Chrome and Firefox. So, imagine you have two cars to chose from. The first car, called Chrome, is really cool - it's quick, it's nice, it's reliable, it's comfortable. There's just one thing. There's a guy on the back seat. He's always there. He writes down wherever you're going. When you go shopping, he makes a copy of the receipt. When you drive with someone, he listens to the…

Why should we listen to you? Have you even tried to turn that stuff off in Chrome? What did you find out?

I mean, you probably shouldn't - I'm being kinda overly dramatic - I don't actually think Chrome listens to your calls and texts or reads you receipts from shopping online - Google has other tools at their disposal (Android and Gmail).

But I like the analogy because I think people don't consider what online tracking means, and creepy dude on backseat is easy to imagine.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#70
post #19

Question on those using firefox as a daily driver on OS X. Comparisons batterywise to safari how much less battery life do you get in general with firefox now? That is my #1 reason for sticking to safari for now. That and I need to find out what extensions I need again after the switch to the new extension model.

Depends on what you do. I don't see much different in general browsing, but youtube takes much less battery in Safari.
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