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In 2024, please switch to Firefox

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Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#231

Post by Simran-B »

cdata wrote: post #35

Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. "Switch, please," calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.

Maybe not dying (yet) but it is technologically behind with a lot of things by now. This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features. Sometimes, there isn't even a signal from Mozilla while Google marks a feature as stable.

Average people probably don't care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.

What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don't work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn't have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.

Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It's the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#232

Post by breischl »

I was using it, though I _think_ it was causing intermittent hangs and crashes on my Win 11 machine. It's hard to be sure, because it was so hard to repro, and could've been due to something else just interacting with FF badly. But it seems like Brave doesn't have the problem.

Which is a shame, I'd like to use FF, and still do on other machines.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#234

Post by loudmax »

jamiek88 wrote: post #12

We all switched to Firefox back in the day because it was better. Better than IE, there was no chrome and safari was a joke. Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently. How do we make Firefox obviously better ? I’m core market for Firefox and just use Safari. Better battery life. And it’s just as good for privacy. At least that’s my impression. Is it wrong? If I don’t use it there’s…

> Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.

Pop culture references aside, `fetch` was also a browser! Sort of. `fetch` was a CLI predecessor to `wget` and `curl`.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#235

Post by cies »

daft_pink wrote: post #177

I think 2024 is going to be ruled by the Arc Browser when it is fully released for Windows. I use it on Mac and it's amazing, but as soon as it's available on Windows, I think people will start recommending it everywhere and everyone is going to start using it.

https://arc.net/

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#236

Post by bad_user »

> "Privacy Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising"

This is BS. Firefox is funded entirely by Google's Ads. Even if you donate to Mozilla, those donations won't be invested in Firefox. At this point, all 3 major browser engines are funded by ads.

You may argue that Mozilla doesn't directly make money from advertising, but that's irrelevant because they'll never do anything to upset their cash cow. And Google can always kill Firefox by avoiding renewing their search deal, without much of a loss, as most Firefox users would switch to Google anyway, much like what users did when they tried switching to Yahoo as the default.

---

UPDATE — A good reason to use Firefox is if it's simply better for you. For me, Firefox is better than Chromium-based alternatives because:

    + History sync is full and actually works;
    + DNS-Over-HTTPS works in parallel to corporate DNS (fallback to system);
    + Tree-style-tabs;
    + Bookmarks management;
    + Reader view (Android & desktop);
    + Great Ctrl+Tab;
    + Non-admin upgrades;
    + uBlock Origin;
    + Total Cookie Protection;
    + Android: multiple search engines;
    + Android: Open in app;
    + Android: Dark Reader, uBlock Origin, Cookie AutoDelete, other extensions;
It also has some issues:

    - poor battery life on macOS, and I fear that Chromium currently has an edge there, even if both are worse than Safari;
    - problems when scrolling on Android, poor performance for certain websites (e.g., Mastodon, Twitter);
    - incompatibility with certain apps (e.g., Microsoft Teams), but in fairness, they've been investing in compatibility, see their recent work on Google Meetup;
Firefox on Android has many issues, and the people denying it aren't doing it any favors. For me, the add-ons more than make up for it, it's my main browser, but I'm still uncomfortable recommending it to family.

I hope Firefox continues to evolve and differentiate itself from Chrome because ideology isn't a good enough reason to prefer it over alternatives, not when Chromium is a thriving open-source project with multiple large companies contributing to it.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#238

Post by emsign »

defensem3ch wrote: post #209

yes, i use firefox too and i love it. however i recently learned vivaldi has tab tiling and it's WAY better for me to use at work because i can see multiple tabs at once. wish firefox could implement this feature too

Tab management in Vivaldi is excellent, it's the main reason I can't switch

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#239

Post by toyg »

jamiek88 wrote: post #12

We all switched to Firefox back in the day because it was better. Better than IE, there was no chrome and safari was a joke. Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently. How do we make Firefox obviously better ? I’m core market for Firefox and just use Safari. Better battery life. And it’s just as good for privacy. At least that’s my impression. Is it wrong? If I don’t use it there’s…

If battery life is all you care about, I'd argue you are not "core market" for FF. You're core-market for OS vendors, who will always be able to give you a better battery life by leveraging all the tips and (typically undocumented) tricks that a cross-platform project cannot touch.
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