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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

howtogeek.com

131–140 of 536 posts

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#131

Firefox is guilty of every single thing Chrome is accused of. * It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy * It shared browsing history without user consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox * It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-…

But until Servo is usable, Firefox is the only defensible choice.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.

How…how many videos are you watching at one time?

On the internet, no one knows you have compound eyes.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#134
post #49
post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

Not totally related but on Firefox mobile you can't have a Youtube video playing while switching to another app anymore.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#135
post #56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be s…

It was fast because in 2008 it used V8 [0] and other browsers didn't. Eventually competitors caught up. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)

And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto.

Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then.

The only source of website lag is ads networks.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#136
post #73

I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough. The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations. It means I can hide my work gmai…

And for those who do actually feel they want to separate their extensions and passwords and such as well, there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re... But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for i…

> there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly

Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!

I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.

And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.

I'm really looking forward for these updates

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#137

I'm glad the writer is enjoying Firefox, but posts like these make me realize we've forgotten how to use computers. Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this…

Firefox’s screenshot tool is a little more advanced than Print Screen. [0] There are situations where it’s really useful to be able to capture the entire web page and not just the visible viewport. [0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-to-capture-...

Moreover, Firefox makes it super easy to screenshot individual elements on a webpage, such as photos, by automatically determining the screenshot boundaries, which means I don't have to manually drag the screenshot area.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#138
I've used Firefox on desktop since 2019. It's upsetting how often (it's not every day, but more often than it should) a website just doesn't work because of the devs didn't test on Firefox at all. I even ran into this on Vanguard, a firm that manages god knows how much in assets, on a page to download PDFs...

I used to get teased (all in good fun) at my last company for being the only dev that used Firefox. Then I'd be the only one to ever catch the Firefox only bugs in PRs.

I get it - it's got way less market share, and for a small company, you may be able to argue the value of the time vs the probability of a bug, but not having your website work on all browsers in the 2020s (aside from new browser features like WebGPU and file system access) is a let down.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#139

I really hope they eventually support all the web APIs chrome does like web midi. Till then if you want to use those APIs you’re making Chrome apps.

Yes - I've been quite disappointed by this recently. I'm trying to make something that can interact with embedded devices and wanted to use the web serial JS API.

Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#140
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually really like Safari… sometimes tabs sync across devices is buggy, reloads a lot. But other than that I’m quite content.

I find Safari on iOS to be nice, and Safari on macOS to be horrifically slow and inadequate, even on the newest M-series processors. It's like two different worlds, you can really tell that all of the engineering time is going into iOS because that's where all the money is at.

I heard someone recently describe Apple as a great hardware company with a few software people. Rings true!

Most of the iOS / MacOS software issues are things that more bodies could fix.

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