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Firefox Browser: best for a free web

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Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#11

Post by starik36 »

trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

> FF browser share has continued to decline steadily

Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#13

Post by bjackman »

I recently switched back to Firefox mobile (I couldn't remember why I switched to Chrome in the first place) because I was sick of using the web without ad blockers.

A few months in I'm really happy with it. Main tip is: I found the scroll behaviour janky when the URL bar was at the top. Once I put it at the bottom (IIRC this is the default anyway, and once I got used to it I realised it's pretty unambiguously a better location) things behaved nicely.

I wish I could install an add-on to deal with GDPR spam but unfortunately without significant faffing you can only run vetted extensions from a fairly short list of adblockers and privacy tools. This seems like a smart move but I wish they'd expand this list, e.g. perhaps blanket-allowing extensions that only use certain safer API subsets.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#14

Post by betwixthewires »

sverhagen wrote: post #7
betwixthewires wrote: post #3

When the "free web" is no longer just lip service from Mozilla I'll consider it.

Care to quickly add some explanation to that stance, before getting voted off the island?

It's not an unheard of point of view on this site, the talking points should already be familiar to you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491021

There's that article as well as my comment and others in it that draw a pretty clear picture.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#15

Post by 46756e »

trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

Just out of curiosity, what are some of Chrome's shady dealings?

I'm not too informed on the subject.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#16

Post by doomrobo »

dont__panic wrote: post #4
trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

I still ask myself: has FF browser share actually dropped that much, or has FF's privacy focus caused browser share estimates to mostly miss FF users in their counts? Most of these stats come from the exact kind of skeevy companies that I (and many other FireFox users) are using FireFox to avoid.

Unfortunately that's not a likely explanation. If you do even the simplest possible measurement, which is just recording user agent strings and IPs, you won't end up undercounting Firefox clients

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#18

Post by eric__cartman »

trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

I would love to continue using FF, but on my machine with an Nvidia card (sigh) the scrolling in Firefox gets very choppy when using two different browser windows open on the dual monitors. And for some reason this bothers me more than it should. Maybe one of these days I should try using it again. It's been over a year since I last tried it. It's odd because the Firefox on the desktop machine with the Nvidia card and a six core AMD CPU is way choppier than on my 7 year old Thinkpad with a dual core i5 and integrated graphics.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#19

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

Firefox is great now, but getting people to change from something that works for them is like pulling teeth

I'd also imagine it's hard to convince younger folks (eg. those who didn't leave firefox in the first place) on firefox over brave which includes adblock out of the box, no setup or extensions required

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#20

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

starik36 wrote: post #11
trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

> FF browser share has continued to decline steadily Is that really a fact though? I read somewhere that >80% FF users have Ad Blocker installed. Wouldn't that keep it hidden to Google Analytics and similar outfits that come up with browser usage stats?

whatsmybrowser.org returns firefox for me with some privacy plugins and ublock origin installed
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