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Why I use Firefox

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281–290 of 319 posts

Re: Why I use Firefox

#281
I was happy to use it for the last three years or so, but recently, I have no idea why, it randomly refuses to load pages. Happens every single day. There seems to be some DNS fuckery going on behind the scenes and Firefox often just seems to think that I am offline. Other browsers always load the pages with no issues, so it is not a network issue. I had disabled all settings that had anything to with DNS, but that didn't solve the problem, so I went back to Chrome.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#282
On MacOS, i don’t like the look and feel of Firefox. I stay on Safari because it looks native and it has a design that fits better with MacOS.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#283
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And soon, thanks to the European Union, it's going to be great on iOS too. Now browsers will be allowed to use their custom engine (they were forced to all use Safari up until now), so thank you EU for the new DMA!

This assumes vendors will bother if only EU users can benefit. Maintaining two significantly different branches is a lot of work.

Mozilla has had like 6 or more "branches" (we call them ports) already going so if one more makes sense, it's not a big deal.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#284
post #214

I use Firefox. (Specifically Librewolf.) That said... > Google can. Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them. Google does offer end-to-end encryption, with a separate "sync passphrase". I honestly suspect all of the major vendors actually do a good enough job here if you configure things right.…

Why is Google's UX crummy. Why are defaults bad? This isn't by accident. This is to bend people towards the Google-benefiting options and against their own self interest. This is called "dark patterns" and it's a bad thing, an evil thing.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#285
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…

"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite." Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment. "Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators." Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborato…

Yes this is the reason Firefox can still survive. But it's easy to turn off, giving you easy and real privacy. On Chrome you don't have real privacy.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

Concrete examples: The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites. imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` paramete…

Never had problems with Zoom and Jitsi in Firefox. Should work fine. I don't think the problem is because Firefox renders sites differently.

On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine. The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or par…

Often people forgot they have installed an obscure exstension in Firefox and that is breaking the site, trying another browser it works, concluding that Firefox must be the problem, while it was the extension. That is also why people usually cannot reproduce the problem later or give concrete examples.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#288
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 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.

* Recording in web client of Duolingo does not work on Firefox, only in chrome. * Webserial for flashing esp for example is not supported * Webauth took forever to be supported (still not sure it's fully supported)

But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, similar to the parent, have very few issues on either my computers or phones. I run Firefox on several different OS's and I just don't have the issues you mention. Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using? Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!

The most recent ones that I ran into seem to have been fixed based on a quick check. mermaid.js docs site was one of them where nothing on the page was clickable (I think Firefox was rendering an invisible div over the entire page) but this issue wasn't present in Chrome or Safari. That appears to have been fixed. Examples are hard to provide since they almost always get fixed but in the moment its enough pain to alw…

If it gets fixed quickly, it was probably an issue with the particular website or a plugin of yours rather than Firefox's issue. People are fast to "conclude" it must be Firefox. You should also test in a private tab with no plugins enabled. That might very well also fix the issue.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#290
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 don't see why I would want to use anything else I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones t…

As a fervent long-time Firefox user I would add that currently there are lots of default settings of freshly installed Firefox that are (for me) utterly wrong. And it feels like a sad trend. Last time I tried to use freshly installed Firefox it felt like a completely different browser than my Firefox with more than a decade old profile. Tabbing was wrong, URL bar behaviour was scary. All can be set back to (subjectively) sane state, what is good, but I really grieved poor folks who just decided to try this browser for the first time and were immediately "welcomed" by such disputable UX.

And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.

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