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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

pcworld.com

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#211

Post by prox »

swat535 wrote: post #195
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the entire HN community would switch to Firefox, it would still be a drop in the ocean to curbing Chrome's market share. Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.

Well, on January 2023 when Chrome Manifest V3 is finally deployed and Ublock Origin is killed, I bet many HNers will finally switch: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/ Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust…

I wonder why they go with Google. Other companies are a much better fit. Time to untangle themselves.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#212

Post by Comevius »

kevincox wrote: post #103
Comevius wrote: post #55

I have been using Firefox since 1.5 or so, and will keep using it because I value customizability. I keep Chromium around for web development, but it has a lot of issues with Wayland (not to be confused with XWayland) currently.

Although with the removal of old extensions Firefox has lost most of its customizability. I really wish they kept those around. Even if they came with scary warnings and would break frequently because only a few APIs were kept stable.

Those old XUL/XPCOM extensions weren't really safe, and the only big loss was UI manipulation, which was kind of stupid anyway, and not at all portable.

When I say customizability I mean user.js.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#213

Post by mark_l_watson »

d_sc wrote: post #69

I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly copying & pasting links to open them in FF. I…

Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn’t make their big money selling advertising targeting services, right? I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#214

Post by tzs »

I switched to Chrome a while back after years on Firefox because of Firefox's terrible spell checking.

It is quite puzzling because Firefox uses the same open source spell checker that Chrome uses and that is also used by LibreOffice and is the OS provided spell checker on Mac.

Here are some examples of words that it botched that nearly everything else (Chrome, Edge, Safari, LibreOffice, anything on Apple that uses the OS provided spell check) got right:

1. all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier

2. ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped "per se" phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail

3. manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer

4. "ad hominem" algorithmically another's backlight ballistically coaxially hatchling impaction implementer inductor intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped

All of those were reported to their bug tracker item for spell check errors. They do eventually fix those, but the lag was in the one to two year range. As of now they have fixed all of #1 except for initializer, all of #2, none of #3, and none of #4 except for algorithmically, ballistically, implementer, and inductor.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#215

Post by mark_l_watson »

wlindley wrote: post #6
ur-whale wrote: post #4

One more reason: firefox will work on older Macs. Case in point: Chrome started to misbehave on my fathers rather old Macbook (missing root certs, refuses to render google drive, etc...) When I open Google drive, after being a completely cryptic (to a non-tech person) set of error messages, I realized I needed to upgrade Chrome. I tried to upgrade Chrome and was told I'm on an unsupported version of OSX. I tried to u…

Ditch 'em all — Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon (the "evil MAGA"). It's like when folks complain about CNN or Fox News but keep feeding the beast by paying for subscription television: Stop hurting yourself, folks!

I totally agree, but I wish you had included MSNBC news with CNN and Fox. They all push a pro-war and corporate agenda, just in different flavors.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#216

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

prox wrote: post #211
swat535 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on January 2023 when Chrome Manifest V3 is finally deployed and Ublock Origin is killed, I bet many HNers will finally switch: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/ Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust…

I wonder why they go with Google. Other companies are a much better fit. Time to untangle themselves.

Because money.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#217

Post by MacsHeadroom »

yalogin wrote: post #191
hnlmorg wrote: 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 don’t get why random websites cannot track you across sites. The IP is still the same and so is the hardware/OS combination it’s running on. They can absolutely track you.

Use a different SOCKS proxy for each container.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#218

Post by MacsHeadroom »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #213
d_sc wrote: post #69

I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly copying & pasting links to open them in FF. I…

Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn’t make their big money selling advertising targeting services, right? I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.

Edge is worse for privacy than Chrome. Even edge "private" browsing mode is significantly less private than Chrome's private browsing. It's one of the worst browsers for privacy.

Edge makes lots of calls to Bing for advertising purposes.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#219

Post by MacsHeadroom »

mrweasel wrote: post #53
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand on your aversion to Mozilla?

While I don’t share the aversion toward Mozilla, I do think it a strange company. For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.

Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission focused on encouraging open source and open web technology. FireFox is a relatively small part of that mission.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#220

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

ByteJockey wrote: post #170
piaste wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it and install it for people, we'd speak positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole list.) I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?

Pretty much. People say that tech people switching doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly when someone asks their friend that's slightly more technical than them for a recommendation, they get recommended the new thing instead of the old one. Whole process takes a couple years or so.

Then why is FF marketshare still tanking despite all the techies hyping it?
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