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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

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311–320 of 408 posts

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. People say that tech people switching doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly when someone asks their friend that's slightly more technical than them for a recommendation, they get recommended the new thing instead of the old one. Whole process takes a couple years or so.

Then why is FF marketshare still tanking despite all the techies hyping it?

Android and to some extent iOS, are the reason.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#313
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the real reason most people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.

I specifically mentioned torrenting, please re-read. There is no reason to have all the network I/O of your computer go through an extra hop just for one application (e.g. a torrent client) when that application can be configured to use a proxy instead. It increases the network latency, complexity and attack surface of your system.

If the main use case is torrents,

I think the reason why the method you mention isn't commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set up and hard to verify.

I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the OS.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ , same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https…

> comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it. edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork. I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.

Brave isn't a fork of Firefox, it is a Chromium-based browser.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ , same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https…

> comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it. edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork. I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.

Uh, I believe that Brave is based on Chromium, not Firefox...

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please go to: Settings(preferences) --> Search Then: Search Suggestions: Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results That should be it. Below, go to Change settings for other address bar suggestions it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using the address bar, suggest Disable or enable as you see fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar" is about the custom search engines one can define (i…

I already have "Provide search suggestions" turned off. It's pulling both of these suggestions out of my browser history. The order firefox uses for suggestions pulled from your history is inconsistent. When searching your history from the address bar, firefox sometimes puts entries matched by domain name first, and sometimes puts entries matched by page contents first.

I'm not in front my my desk right now, but is it possible the results from History are weighted by frequency and/or recency? I know these attributes are recorded in the History db.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#318
A very nice feature that is only available in FF and not Chrome is the ability to display subtitles/closed captions in Picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. It's a game changer for me, who uses PIP heavily on my ultrawide monitor to watch Youtube videos.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#319
post #40

I would really love to use Firefox Sync. But I don't want all my browsing history at Mozilla. Is it possible to run self-hosted Sync?

Sync is E2E encrypted, so while Mozilla host an encrypted file they don’t have access to your data. (yes, it’s also possible to run your own sync service.)

Is it though? I have not been able to find any official up-to-date docs on it. The Github README says that it is no longer maintained: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#320
post #69

I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly copying & pasting links to open them in FF. I…

Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn’t make their big money selling advertising targeting services, right? I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.

Assuming you use ublock origin, does it really matter? For all intents and purposes, whatever data is collected is absolutely worthless.
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