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The endless browser wars

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191–200 of 242 posts

Re: The endless browser wars

#191
post #127

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? OT, but I think this is an interesting psychological phenomenon that occurs in a lot of settings, in particular politics: People, services, products etc are not judged by objective (or even just common) standards but by the standards they announce for themselves . So someone who claims…

I would think it is an excuse to just use chromium, because this is what the person actually prefers, but his ideology(or peer group) tells him or her to use FF.

Re: The endless browser wars

#192
post #185

I wish more people with give Firefox a honest try. I've been using it for years and I love it. It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site. Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached…

Firefox seems to grow on me more and more every day. I really like all the integrations like reader mode, picture-in-picture, the new email alias stuff. There’s a lot that I don’t care about like containers or whatever the special tab system is, but I like that they’re trying new ideas.

Re: The endless browser wars

#193

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

You don't consider chromium open source?

I think OP does because Brave uses Chromium.

Re: The endless browser wars

#195
I’d like to start contributing money to Firefox. Can anyone weigh in on whether that’s best done through a donation to Mozilla or by paying for the premium Firefox features like Pocket or their VPN? I don’t necessarily need or want these, but they seem more Firefox-focused than a donation to Mozilla.

Re: The endless browser wars

#197
post #127

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? OT, but I think this is an interesting psychological phenomenon that occurs in a lot of settings, in particular politics: People, services, products etc are not judged by objective (or even just common) standards but by the standards they announce for themselves . So someone who claims…

> So someone who claims strict moral integrity and then falls short of that is seen as less trustworthy than someone who is upfront about being shady and then surprisingly acts less shady than expected.

I don't think this effect exists at all. Google broke "don't be evil" and people still massively choose to use Google services as if nothing ever happened.

Re: The endless browser wars

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

That would require nuanced discussion. We can't have that! (Kidding aside, I happily use Brave because I find Firefox borderline unusable, but also find Google's tactics unpalatable.) The larger issue is there shouldn't be a war. There should be as many browsers as people have the hearts desire to create, and it shouldn't matter because they all follow the same standards. However, in the real world, we've seen the no…

This post touches on the 'other' issue with Firefox - the various user unfriendly features that cause friction when using it. I want to love Firefox, but my time is valuable and using Brave instead saves time and frustrations, vs Firefox.

I'm pretty sure these subtle but numerous usability issues are on purpose from up high, because the usability could be fixed so easily. Still Google isn't paying 95% of Mozilla's and Moz's executives bills for them to beat Chrome, but rather to provide a lightning rod for monopoly concerns. From Google's point of view it's a bonus that it wastes the time of the market segment that cares about open systems!

Re: The endless browser wars

#199
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me…

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

The documentation for FF ESR on how to enable/disable basic features exists but its vast and there's a trillion ways to do everything. It seems a lot less like a browser and more like a browser wrapped in an open source framework that I don't like. Maybe they could sell it to Microsoft and you could wrap it in Edge.

Re: The endless browser wars

#200
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me…

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

A killer feature for me is opening the history & download list in a tab instead of a window. This way I don't have to alt+tab twice to switch to the next application. Opening the history in the same tab (ctrl+h) isn't good enough because I usually need the time of visit and there is no shortcut to open the download list in the same window.

Perhaps this is just muscle memory and I would think oppositely if I never switched to chrome.

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