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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#321

Post by kdbg »

toma_caliente wrote: post #193
mark_l_watson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very suspect at best. Especially the ones you see commonly pushed by Youtubers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc. I think the only VPNs that have actually been externally audited are Mullvad and ProtonVPN.

Funnily, both ExpressVPN and NordVPN which you call out have been externally audited.

NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]

ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]

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For comparison

Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]

ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]

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I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)

[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu

[2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/?s=audit

[3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits/

[4] https://protonvpn.com/blog/?s=audit

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#322

Post by stragies »

robin_reala wrote: post #43
stragies wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync". The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.

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.

to be clear, by "intentionally" I meant, that I could understand, if it were a business decision to allocate less/no developer time to making the "100% self-hosted"-option very attractive/documented/easy. I did not mean to insinuate intentional hurdle-introductions via code, or some-such.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#323

Post by alpaca128 »

moffkalast wrote: post #266
sph wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please show me how to drag a url from my phone to my Linux desktop.

Wait, and how is Firefox capable of doing that?

With an online account that syncs the Firefox profile across all devices. And part of that is the ability to send a link to a specific device, which will then automatically load that URL in a new tab.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#324

Post by black_puppydog »

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…

This.

Ever since version 2 or so, the Firefox autocompletion has made me never use bookmarks. It's simply that good.

As others have said, it requires some tweaking nowadays. If anyone at mozilla is reading... why?! I mean, I get it, newbies... but... why?!

Anyhow, bookmarks and keeping them, clicking through endless expanding nested menus of them, just the very concept... very much something for the hostages of a corporation that wants every contact with the web to start (and end) with a visit to google.com

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#325

Post by gurjeet »

yonrg wrote: post #269

Firefox plugin ftw: tridactyl I love this so much. Perfect vim key binds. I also removed menu, address and tab bars, which subjectively occupy 25% of vertical space. And the infamous ublock, but that's also available on Chrome(ium).

I'm a fan of Vimium [1]. Do you know of any advantages Tridactyl may have over Vimium?

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#326

Post by johnny22 »

jordemort wrote: post #232
zelphirkalt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible. EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances: firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u

I'm pretty sure the profile manager stuff in Firefox goes all the way back to the Netscape 4 days. If I recall correctly, back in the way back, it used to throw you into Profile Manager and walk you through creating your initial one on first launch of fresh installs. At some point they tucked that under the rug and just started creating the default profile automatically - maybe because it made less sense to ask for a…

my parents rely on Profile Manager. I set that up for them years ago, since my mom uses my dad's computer a bit every day. She has no need for a whole user account. Separating the stuff in the browser is enough.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#327

Post by gs17 »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #304
dandellion wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ , same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https…

> comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it. edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork. I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.

Be prepared for stuff to break. I recently tried it and DRM content sometimes doesn't work no matter what you enable (my recent example is Udemy, which the devs claim happens in other FF forks). Also, by default it wipes history/sessions when you close it, which can be a rude surprise.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#328

Post by MaurizioPz »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #82

I always use Firefox, but there is one annoying thing they do not seem able to fix: The debugger. It often happens to me, that I can step through code, but I simply cannot see the value of variables at all, not by hovering, not by adding them to watched variables. This often happens when working on JupyterLab. And some days it works suddenly. Maybe JupyterLab has become so overheady, that the debugger gives up or som…

Something similar happens to me working in angular. I can see the value referencing it as _this.variableName instead of this.variableName

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#329

Post by gurjeet »

loudthing wrote: post #256

How did Chrome become so popular instead of Firefox in the first place? Was it purely Google's advertising of their browser? Brand recognition is so important to typical consumers.

IMHO, performance. Chrome's V8 engine (for running JavaScript) was way ahead of competition when it was released. It took Firefox many years to come close to it.

Disclosure: Happy Firefox user since v1. Sometimes I was jealous of Chrome's speed, sometimes I was weary of Firefox's memory leaks, but never enough to leave the flexibility and customizability the Firefox provided.

EDIT: ... and now Firefox is fast enough, and isn't a memory hog anymore, so I continue to be a very happy Firefox user.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#330

Post by rsync »

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…

"FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me ..."

They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing.

In no particular order ...

- You can't clear history for a particular container space [1]

- Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container

- No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside of each individual tab

No, I am not interested in solving these basic, first-order use-cases with some rando extension from joey75 @ gitlabusercontent.downloads.tv.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1170863

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