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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

pcworld.com

171–180 of 408 posts

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox Profile Switcher add-on provides an easy-to-use interface that looks just like Chrome's: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3). I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its o…

I've been looking for something like that. Thanks. But ideally, I don't want to swithswitch profiles. I want to have muliple instances of FF open, each with a different profile. Just like Chromium based browsers and users. Anything for that?

This is how I use Firefox; you need Qubes OS for that.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#172
post #121
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any YouTube I watch on android I watch on NewPipe. It's amazing.

Yes, it's amazing, until the API changes and you have to wait for an update for it to work. Also, you only get to see top level comments. (Maybe that's a feature for some people.)

I disable comments altogether in Newpipe, which for me is a great feature.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#173
post #21

>Automatic blocking of autoplay videos And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo. "Lighter on system resources" "Speedier website browsing" I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

> I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.

Have over 2000 tabs as well, on an old Macbook Air. Have to turn off Firefox Fission though.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#174
post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

"random websites cannot track me between sites"

Given all the ways there are to fingerprint browsers these days, this belief is likely to be overly optimistic.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#175
post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

I use it for personal, company and other sessions in the same window, to authenticate with different credentials on the same sites. It's fantastic!

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla really can’t win can they? They’re the only browser company that even attempts to provide the ability to run your own syncing service, and yet the insinuation is that they’re going out of their way to make it difficult.

Turns out the sum of something’s value isn’t just what it can do but how easy it is to make it do the thing is claims to do.

I'm not sure, that can be stated as fact, but for this subtopic (How to run all FXA and syncserver selfhosted) the docs make it sound easy to deploy/run. As expected, after all, the featureset needed isn't huge for "Maintain a list of tabs per browsers per User, authenticated via some backend plugin for the syncserver". But then you read, that you need to run half a dozen "fxa-something" servers, in addition to the SyncServer. And a clear writeup of those is what I briefly check for every few months, but haven't found yet.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#177
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm starting to see broken sites What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked the…

I'm not the person you were replying to, but a few broken sites I've noticed are: web.skype.com Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) -- apparently no support for insertable streams stuff.co.nz from outside NZ

I don't have a Microsoft account so couldn't try web.skype..com. Not sure what insertable streams are.

I tried stuff.co.nz from the UK and it looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/tibMwHE

Articles loaded fine; I'm not sure what is broken about it.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#178
post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

A crucial feature which is missing for me in containers is the ability to limit AddOns to specific containers.

My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.

I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#179
post #30

I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop. I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible…

> I'm starting to see broken sites What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked the…

HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.

This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...

A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.

I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.

Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#180
post #30

I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop. I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible…

Every time something is broken for me on a site it is because of an addon/extension, not because of Firefox. I beleave Firefox get much blame for broken sites when it actually is an addon that the user installed which is to blame.

I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.

So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.

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