I switched to Firefox and the main thing that made me stay is that I can actually find stuff in history. Chrome and Chomium based browsers are so bad at history search.
Why I use Firefox
191–200 of 319 posts
Re: Why I use Firefox
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust was a Mozilla side project for a while. Then (if I'm remembering the posts right), they laid off most of the team.
Wasn’t that servo?
Servo was a browser rendering engine written entirely in Rust. It was a casualty of COVID and transferred to the Linux Foundation in 2020.
Rust was a project started by Mozilla Research employees but not affiliated with Mozilla. Though they did sponsor it in 2009.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the chrome people have a hand in writing those standards…
Chrome basically is the standard. If Chrome adds it, developers will use it.
And this is exactly the problem.
Google is a better steward of their default position than Microsoft was, by a mile, so far.
But the web and the internet is more important than Google.
Use Firefox. :)
Re: Why I use Firefox
#194Nobody uses Brave?? I've nearly completely switched to Brave - I still use Firefox occasionally but Edge is my second most used Browser. I haven't used Chrome for over 5 years.
Brave is based on Chromium which contributes to the browser engine monopoly.
While I understand why that's a problem, at this point:
1. Firefox's marketshare is completely irrelevant for preventing Chrome's monopoly;
2. Activism doesn't work;
3. Firefox is funded almost entirely by Google's ads, Google can effectively kill it by just pulling the plug, which effectively means that they can't actually compete with Chrome if that means endangering the golden goose — wake me up when Firefox starts blocking some ads in Google's search or on YouTube, out of the box ;-)
Re: Why I use Firefox
#195I 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 have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#196Moved over to Edge. Can turn any PDF into an audio book with its 'Read Aloud' feature and has copilot built in to ask for a summary of any page. Even Bing is good as it has copilot built into search.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox OS was actually a not terrible idea. Instead of having applications written in a platform-specific stack, do it with web technologies and make the apps PWAs. Seeing how many people are now criticizing Apple for hobbling PWAs with Safari on iOS, I'd say they were just ahead of their time.
Plus it lives on today as KaiOS, you can buy plenty of phones that run it. It didn’t end up challenging the Apple/Google duopoly like Mozilla wanted but I think they should have stuck with it anyways.
It makes sense that it didn't for technical and business reasons. We weren't where we are now on PWA technologies in 2012. But it would also introduced another layer of data permissions abstraction over the info so many of these applications rely on to be so profitable.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#198Nobody uses Brave?? I've nearly completely switched to Brave - I still use Firefox occasionally but Edge is my second most used Browser. I haven't used Chrome for over 5 years.
I switched from Firefox to Brave. For me, at this point, there's no better option.
I occasionally try Firefox, but it has several issues that annoy me and that have been unfixed for years. They're doing good work, and I hope they'll catch up, but until they fix their management issues, I've lost faith.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#199I 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 use Firefox as a secondary browser on my Macs and primary browser on Windows and Linux, but I agree. It lacks polish, and its UI feels “off” in ways that are difficult to articulate.
It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
That post's points about Mozilla's source of revenue and expenditure on their CEO are good, but the rest is a politically motivated hit job. They spend the first few sections establishing that Mozilla has a ton of revenue, and then the best examples of misspent money they can bring up are utter peanuts in comparison to the revenue they literally just established Mozilla has. $300,000 is nothing compared to $600,000,000, yet they continue pretending it's this huge unconscionable amount of money: "possibly millions" — how? Unless there are literally hundreds of these companies they're sending these tiny amounts of money to, it adds up to a tiny amount of their overall spending, let alone revinue.
Why? These are such tiny, meaningless amounts in the grand scheme of Mozilla's finances, why focus on them so much and make such a big deal out of them?
Well, from their analyses of the companies this money is being sent to, including the copious use of scare quotes around basic terms like cis, as well as several comments about the political leanings of these organizations, it's very clear that the author of this blog post is not really upset because Mozilla is spending money that isn't related to their core mission, since it's basically a drop in the bucket, but is really more angry that the money is going to places they politically disagree with.
Their argument that this is objectively bad, as opposed to just being a reason for them and other conservatives to not donate if they really care that much, is just hogwash too. The idea that the people who are donating to Mozilla think all of that money is going to building the browser and would have no way of knowing that Mozilla is a politically motivated organization that has a certain stance and will donate money to further that stance is absurd: Mozilla makes it very clear that they as a foundation exist to do far more than just work on Firefox and a few other projects, that they have large scale social goals, and neither do they do anything to hide the fact that their values and goals are oriented very much in a progressive direction. The idea that someone would be shocked that Mozilla has a progressive leaning and is looking to forward progressive causes after reading this (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/) or many other things on their site is just laughable to me.