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

robert.ocallahan.org

171–180 of 343 posts

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

#171

Note this advice is true for email services as well. Pay for and use an alternative now, or later you won't get the choice. Google is hellbent on locking people into their ecosystem. One such move is the promotion of AMP: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terribl... Speaking of email and browsers, the Gmail app on top of iOS presents the user with a choice between two browsers: 1. Safari 2. Chrome,…

Copying links out of Hangouts on iOS results in getting a massive Google tracking url.

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

#172
post #9

Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…

Chrome has better security unless you want to keep yourself secure from prying by Google.

In some ways. This is the same browser that doesn't (or "didn't"? It's been a while since I've looked) do CLR-based certificate revocation checks because Google didn't like the standard, but will black list specific revoked test certificates to make it look like they do (Verisign had a test site for a while with a revoked cert). To be fair, they are right: CLRs are sometimes huge and downloading them is a pain, but they're still the standard and Chrome decided it didn't want to use them.

So then OCSP comes along and everything will be fine now, right? Nope, Chrome doesn't (or, again, "didn't", they might have fixed this since I last looked, but that doesn't make it any better) let you do any sort strict revocation checking, so if the OCSP response failed and a response wasn't pinned, Chrome would happily let you in without bothering to check revocation (Firefox does this by default too, annoyingly, but it does have a strict mode).

Even if these things have been fixed, Chrome's general attitude towards web standards and security is to run away and not bother when they don't get their way, so even if you're not already skeptical of blanket claims that they're "more secure", which is a meaningless thing to say, there is evidence that their attitude towards web security might make them less so.

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

#173

I've seen the comment here on HN and a few other sites in the past few days - are there sites out there that don't work in Firefox, but do work in Chrome? Like, I'm aware of a few CSS properties that work in Chrome but not FF, but I don't think I've ever come across a site that doesn't look or work completely fine in FF. The only exception to this that I can think of is Google Earth, which I'm pretty sure you can ope…

Google Hangouts failed in Firefox for me last week. Had to break the Chromium out.

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

#175
It’s great to see people swapping to Firefox from chrome, but if you really want to support them, consider donating to Mozilla. As others have said, there is a conflict of interest as they getting funding from google. I donate £30/$40 a year to Mozilla for this reason, and put my money where my mouth is.

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

#177

What if I chose Opera? Personally, I've never liked Firefox; it has always felt clunky.

Opera Software is acquired by a group of Chinese companies,[1] and one of them is Qihoo 360, which has a lot of negative history.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360#Controversies

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft would be the one forking Chromium in this case, so I really don't think that's true. Microsoft is more than capable of doing it.

The whole reason Microsoft gave up on their own engine is because no one was using it, not even inside the company. Why would Edge suddenly become popular just because of a rendering engine change?

... because it is the default on Windows? The marketing effort of Chrome can be chipped away if "they are basically the same", which is a fair comment now that Edge is basically a glorified fork of Chromium

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

#179
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed Webrender. I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting l…

Any pointers on how to do it?

Currently webrender only works on nightly builds unless you have NVIDIA hardware on Windows 10 (not considered mature enough on other hardware/platforms yet).

But to enable it you turn on gfx.webrender.all in about:config.

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

#180
post #9

Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…

As nobody responsible for that Mr. Robot thing got fired, I trust Mozilla about the same as Google/Microsoft.
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