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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#251

Post by SaulJLH »

boudin wrote: post #29
SaulJLH wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge is better than Chrome, & better than FF in many respects, too. Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers dissuade... Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility, & flexible.

I wouldn't touch Edge because I still remember the days when IE was dominating the market. As much as I despise Google being the one now, I do not miss those days and do not trust Microsoft to do anything good if they were in this position again. So you can make fun of people concerned about privacy, but history proved there's a lot more concerns to have regarding Microsoft

I remember those times too, completely different group of management, and the way they've done business in the last near decade, has also been very different. Some throwbacks, but on the whole, vastly different. I've been watching, you clearly haven't. And aside from that, they're never going to be in the "same position", the market is entirety different.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#252

Post by kevincox »

Comevius wrote: post #212
kevincox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence the "scary warnings". I don't think UI manipulation is stupid, I don't believe that Mozilla makes the best UI and extensions can definitely improve on it for many more specific use cases. Portability is also nice but not everything needs to be widely portable, I would rather have a nice feature in Firefox than not having it because it wasn't portable across browsers.

To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am glad that they were implemented and I think that they should be the recommended API. But I would love to still have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a year after they stopped officially supporting these extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed or third-part signed extensions.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#253

Post by dandanua »

cdrini wrote: post #241

One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are. I can type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and it'll instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited, whether on my desktop or on my phone. It's become my primary second brain for finding Google docs, or articles I've read, or GitHub issues. It's usually only a few characters before…

You can also add tags to bookmarks and let it search only through bookmarks. Now I just bookmark everything, so I don't need to use google's search a second time and filter again all that SEO and other crap. Moreover, I even bookmark some of my local files, since adequate tagging capabilities in file systems are still technologies from future, apparently.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#254

Post by SaulJLH »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #72
SaulJLH wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge is better than Chrome, & better than FF in many respects, too. Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers dissuade... Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility, & flexible.

you're absolutely right, it's great for an average consumer who doesn't care about privacy

Mainly great for users who are way more technically literate than the avg. hand-wavey user.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#255

Post by rvz »

Mozilla is a joke when it comes to privacy and being dependent of Google's money and it is quite a funny sight to see that after 14 years [0] of trying to figure a way to make money after 'promising' to not rely on Google, they still can't and continue to aid their surveillance capitalism

With that, I have heard all the (very weak) reasons listed in this article and at this point, you might as well use Brave browser since everything listed here is already implemented by them.

Firefox (really) has no killer features and the chronic decrease in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already over taken it. [1][2][3]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

[3] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#257

Post by qwertyuiop_ »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #187
nfbyte wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also set a proxy per container (and assign specific websites to always use it), and when you combine that with an ultra-cheap VPS running e.g. a Shadowsocks server you have what I think is the real way to circumvent censorship and bypass regional restrictions (as opposed to using snake oil "VPN" providers or even the Tor Browser).

Are most VPN provides unreliable? I don’t know - never researched this. I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.

Mulvad seems to be very reliable.

https://mullvad.net/en/

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#258

Post by [deleted] »

was_a_dev wrote: post #144
andrepd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim. People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.

[deleted]

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#259

Post by nyanpasu64 »

swfsql wrote: post #181
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish LibreWolf supported Firefox Sync. I appreciate how they removed Firefox's sell-out advertising, promotions for Mozilla Corporation products, and telemetry by default. But I couldn't get sync to work; it's my main blocker from using it as my daily driver. (Some smaller annoyances as a developer are not having about:crashes to examine, debug, and upload coredumps on an opt-in basis, and Firefox Profiler not havi…

My sync worked normally, except for the password autofill (but the passwords are still saved on the Settings)

Running LibreWolf on Windows 7 on an older machine, with ublock0 set to default-deny JS for performance reasons. I tried enabling Firefox Sync in about:preferences#librewolf, visiting the settings, and logging in again. This time I got further, when I logged in I got asked for 2FA, but it logged into accounts.firefox.com but not the browser.

When I restarted LibreWolf, a Tools -> Sign In option appeared, but https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=email&service=syn... asked for the password of a now-removed email (which is now neither a primary nor secondary email, why is it still in Firefox's servers?!) under the same account. Entering my password said that I should use my primary email again, and selecting "Use a different account", entering my email and password, and another 2FA did not sign into sync (Tools still says "Sign in", as did about:preferences#sync). Logging in a third time emailed me instead of asking for a 2FA code, but yet again did not sign into my browser.

This accounts.firefox.com bug scares me; it reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435. At this point, I think I'm going to delete and recreate my Firefox account to remove all traces of my old email.

EDIT: I tried deleting my Firefox account, but realized it would remove my Fenix addon collections too. I tried signing into addons.mozilla.org... and again saw my removed email on the login screen.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#260

Post by mattarm »

beebeepka wrote: post #159
shadowgovt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it is "between adding features and debugging Firefox performance issues, one gets you promoted and one doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the latter benefits about 5% of users at most. The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.

That may be a small part of the truth but even a 12 year old me wouldn't believe such a fairy tale to be the whole reason. MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.

I can agree that Google simply neglects Firefox performance and features. I think this alone is enough to explain why Google products work better on Chrome.

Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?

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