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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

#351

Post by MBCook »

TingPing wrote: post #234
zahma wrote: post #48

Among all the other extensions that help guard my privacy and improve QoL, Containers is another great feature that integrates well with FF. I like maintaining profiles for privacy and security, and it helps me navigate certain sites where I have different accounts. I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing…

Safari is fairly pro privacy and blocks or deletes data more aggressively than others sometimes.

It also integrates extremely tightly into the Apple ecosystem and has always had fantastic performance with very little resource usage. Unlike chrome (although that’s gotten much better).

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#352

Post by MBCook »

gurjeet wrote: post #329
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,…

This matches my memory as well. Safari was dramatically faster but it was limited to the Mac (let’s just ignore the Windows version).

Chrome was based on Safari and was far far faster than anything else available on Windows at the time. Not only that but they moved fast and kept improving.

Firefox is great now but it took a long time to catch up.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#353

Post by IshKebab »

lol768 wrote: post #248
neogodless wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work. I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location. > This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdk…

> I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues

It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.

It's open source victim blaming.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#354

Post by coayer »

gandalfff wrote: post #125

I fired up Firefox and Chrome on Kubuntu on a 2008 iMac and was surprised to find that Firefox could play 1080p video on YouTube but Chrome kept dropping frames at 480p. It's definitely worth trying both to see which is faster.

Sounds like HW acceleration wasn't working on Chrome, no?

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#355

Post by [deleted] »

gs17 wrote: post #327
heresie-dabord wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#356

Post by twangist »

kristiandupont wrote: post #64
sph wrote: 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…

time.com, pages simply didn't appear -- at least this was the case in recent versions of FF, can't swear it's so in latest. Other sites can lack "Search" buttons that appear in Chrome & Safari, or their forms don't work in FF but do in other browsers. It's a real problem.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#357

Post by prox »

sp332 wrote: post #281
throw10920 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, my experience has been that Chrome's address bar does only matching on whole "fragments" of URLs - that is, if I visited a URL with /foobarbaz/ in the name, Firefox will match that with "bar" while Chrome won't - which is pretty terrible behavior. And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs, and crippled ad-blocker API. As an information management tool , Firefox is light-years ahead…

I've only been using Chrome for about a year, but if I want the find something in my history, I have to open the history window (ctrl-h). The address bar is very inconsistent about returning pages that I've been to recently or often.

Hope you will take FF for a spin!

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#358

Post by shaman1 »

I tried using Firefox on Android for a while but had to switch back to Chrome mainly because Firefox reloads the page if you put it in the background even for a few seconds. This caused real issues when I had to approve a payment on a banking app I'm using - after aproval going back to Firefox the page got refreshed and I had to do it again. Chrome somehow manages to keep the page loaded even with tens of open tabs.

Another thing missing in the Android version is the Print function. Such a basic feature!

I've been using it on the desktop too and there it works ok, no major issues - just the print dialog was much poorer then Chrome's and I had to print from Chrome.

Firefox has a many people rooting for it but not enough people contributing.

Brave strangely decided to go with Chromium rather than Firefox as a base even though Brendan knew Firefox much better. And many other browsers have decided the same Vivaldi, Edge, etc. At this stage I'm afraid Firefox has too many unpolished edges, especially on mobile to match the competition.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#360

Post by pvinis »

sph wrote: post #239
alduin32 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking…

> What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ? Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem. Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some…

Hard disagree. I don't want Tor and torrents and email and other crapware on my browser. And not on my Firefox. It already has too much of that with pocket. They can focus on the engine and the UI. Leave useless stuff as separate applications.
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