We need an alternative to Chrome if nothing else to stop the full blown enshittification of the browser. Its more private, it has better extensions and its not treating its users like sources of data. More people should use Firefox there are lots of reasons not to use Chrome now.
Why I use Firefox
111–120 of 319 posts
Re: Why I use Firefox
#112I use Firefox with the excellent https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix I discovered on HN.
I wish that Mozilla didn't bungle the UI for no reason, but here we are.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#113I'd love to use FIrefox but I haven't found how to get around Google's on-purpose slowing down of their products (which I have to use for work) when running inside Firefox.
i get paid by the hour so i don't care if the pages load slower ha
Re: Why I use Firefox
#114For me it's > Mozilla develops their own browser engine This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.
It would be true, if in practice all the finances of Mozilla didn't come from Google. So it's like Google wearing a mask.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#115Sometimes I wonder where Firefox might be today if, in the last 10 years, it had competent leadership singularly focused on delivering the absolute best browser in existence.
Oh look, it's my least favorite HN trope.
Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"
Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money there'd be screaming if they tried)"
Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem? FirefoxOS led to a bunch of focus on memory usage & responsiveness as well as web APIs that provided more parity between web and native apps. LetsEncrypt got a big boost from Mozilla as did Opus and AV1. Rust is in a class of its own. The VPN deal doesn't require that much investment from Mozilla since it's based on Mullvad. The voice & language database is a big boon to the current open source AI training movement, etc.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#116Re: Why I use Firefox
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, wouldn’t Chrome be much closer to being Internet Explorer?
Internet Explorer did their own thing and damn web standards. Chrome follows the standards.
Chrome follows a lot of draft standards that they themselves submitted. Not really the same thing.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#118I like Firefox for being able to edit internal CSS stylesheets in the devtools.
Chrome never gained that ability for whatever reason.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#119For me it's > Mozilla develops their own browser engine This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.
Googles recognition of this fact seems to be exactly why they keep Mozilla afloat. Firefox is the best anti-anti-trust argument that have.
This seems to be a popular opinion, but I believe they probably do it because it's good for their bottom line. The MS case was very different. The only relevant market was desktop computing, they had a monopoly on the desktop OS market, they baked the browser into the OS for no good reason, and they were taking actions to make OS competition impossible. Having a high desktop browser market share number honestly isn't a problem.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#120It's a great browser for Android. You get superior ad blocking and background video playing, extensions like dark reader...
I use it for 95% of my browsing, with exactly the extensions you mention, but I do have to recognize it's stability is rough at times. Every now and then I run into a site that fails hard, crashing the entire UI on my Pixel 6 Pro. Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.
Same, Firefox on Android is extremely buggy for me. I experience frequent crashes because I have too many tabs open at once. Multiple times per day, I have to restart the app because the theme will bug between light and dark, which makes some of the UI text unreadable. And sometimes when I restart, I lose some of my most recent tabs for some reason. Very frustrating, but Firefox Sync and extension support are essential for me, so I deal with it.
By the way, I actually use Fennec from F-Droid and not Firefox from the Google Play Store, if that matters.