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Why I use Firefox

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Re: Why I use Firefox

#151

Post by lelanthran »

crazygringo wrote: post #28
cangeroo wrote: post #23

How can we as users provide funding for open software like Firefox, in the same way that Wikipedia receives crowdfunding? At the very least as a supplement to the money they receive from Google. And even better, to fund more research projects, like their sponsorship of research into Rust and WebAssembly.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate It's in the footer to Mozilla's website.

You can't support FF. You can only give money to Mozilla, who may or may not use it for FF.

In actual practice, Mozilla grabs all the donations intended for FF and pools it with all donations, which then gets used for social justice programs.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#152

Post by walrus01 »

mariusor wrote: post #145
walrus01 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's good that HN doesn't support punycode so that you can know immediately that you're visiting an IDN domain name, and people don't try to sneak in submissions with IDF homograph similarities to troll or pretend to be a site that they're not.

I doubt that a malicious punycode host name would pass muster more than a minute under the scrutiny of the HN crowd.

Indeed so, but it would be amusing to see someone try. More likely someone would register a $11 throw away .com or .net domain to host a temporary httpd and post as a joke with some hand crafted satire of a new tech product, which has lots of potential.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#153

Post by zahma »

javajosh wrote: post #50
zahma wrote: post #19

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about op…

I agree. I would also suggest occasionally checking out the other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi because they often have a surprising feel and feature set. Vivaldi in particular has a very nice RSS/Atom feed reader built into it, and Opera tends to be very fast. (Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shop…

I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#154

Post by berkes »

stronglikedan wrote: post #147
zahma wrote: post #19

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about op…

In my opinion, Chrome is more polished (no pun intended). Just the little things that allow me to work faster, whether the browser itself is faster or not. I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome.

> I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome

I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.

That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.

It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#155

Post by cl3misch »

> The user’s data is stored on the browser vendor’s servers, and this data is of course encrypted. But can the browser vendor decrypt this data? Google can.

Can it? You can set an additional password for synchronization. I was under the impression this implies end-to-end encryption.

Of course, Chrome might send this data back to Google once synced and decrypted by the user. But Mozilla might do that just the same.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#156

Post by sph »

Alifatisk wrote: post #62

I use Firefox across all my devices, they are seamlessly synced. To be honest, the sole reason I use FF is because I don't want to be part of Googles monopoly, and because FF just works.

My killer feature is sharing tabs from my phone to desktop. With Chrome I think it's possible only when logged in to their spy centre, with Safari+Linux it is impossible.

I hate that no one has yet made a third party tab sharing system. I don't think it would be rocket science to have an app you can "share" URLs with which sends it elsewhere. I remember years ago while shopping for browsers that Firefox was the only one with this feature, which boggles the mind. Brave last I tried didn't support it.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#157

Post by mariusor »

charcircuit wrote: post #13

Gecko is my least favorite feature of Firefox because it doesn't properly handle websites like github where it doesn't show the full page forcing you to reopen the page in a new tab and close the bugged one. If Firefox doesn't have the resources to properly handle common sites they should just I switch to Blink to leverage a better maintained browser engine. It would also let Firefox invest more resources into differ…

I'll take your comment at face value, but implying that alternate rendering engines is just "duplicate work" instead of providing one of the few ways to fight against the full monopoly on the web by Google is plainly absurd.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#158

Post by Meegul »

incontrol wrote: post #37
zahma wrote: post #19

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about op…

Funny enough on my machine, Chrome is the slowest on https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ 401 - Chrome 446 - Firefox 546 - Safari

357 - Chrome with extensions

511 - Chrome without any extensions

433 - Clean firefox install

500 - Clean edge install

On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM

Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#159

Post by dominick-cc »

zahma wrote: post #19

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about op…

I use chromium-browsers only for video conferencing because I have had some weird scenarios with choppy video on firefox.
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