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In 2024, please switch to Firefox

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Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People here have a major hateboner against Brave. Some of it is crypto, some of it is Eich, relatively little the product itself.

Yeah, it does have all the crypto bloatware, but it doesn't force it on you so all of that can just be ignored. I actually think Brave (and maybe Safari) is the least opinionated browser in terms of features it forces on you and it's somewhat easy to turn off or ignore what you don't want. I might be deluding myself but it's always feels like the lightest browser that I use.

It's so bloated: https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#722
post #545

I use Firefox as my default browser on my desktop and netbook (Windows/Linux), as well as my phone (Android), since the addons I want to use are available there and there's no Manifest v3 weirdness. The UI and performance are both okay (though content process limit is no longer exposed through the UI which isn't that nice when your netbook has like 4 GB of RAM), I quite enjoy the DevTools in particular, even more so…

I don't understand. How does Firefox on desktop "break" access to some websites? They ban any IP address using Firefox desktop? And somehow detect when the same person uses a VPN service?

> I don't understand. How does Firefox on desktop "break" access to some websites?

When I checked, I think there were DNS resolution failures for some domains. This was regardless of whether PIA DNS or the existing DNS servers were used. It was also regardless of whether OpenVPN or WireGuard were used, or which VPN server was used - the only pre-requisite was that the VPN be active and Firefox be used on a MacBook in particular.

It was very odd and hasn't ever happened on Windows/Linux with Firefox either, nor did happen on the MacBook with Brave afterwards either. I didn't care enough to dig into it, but some people had similar issues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/18nh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/14yl...

It seems that the suggested "fix" that worked for the other person is to disable IPv6 altogether:

> This is a bug in Firefox, you can fix it by opening about:config in Firefox and set network.dns.disableIPv6 to true

Not like it makes me like Firefox any less, it's just odd that we get super random issues like that for relatively basic use cases (albeit maybe various VPN implementations aren't necessarily that common, who knows). Would be nice to live in a world where everything "just works", though.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#723

> the only remaining ethical web browser I hate associating ethics with technical debates. Chrome didn't win by being ethical, it won by being better. Plain words cannot save Firefox from losing its market share. I know battling against tech giants is hard, but appealing to ethics will only lead to hostility for some people.

Chrome won by being unethical (and continuing to do so), for a while every time you visited some Google site you were bombarded with "switch to Chrome" banners.

At the same time they often artificially slow down Firefox on Google sites (see e.g. the recent news about some code on YouTube)

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#724
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.

I always read that some sites don't work with Firefox but the writers never mentions which sites are broken. So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?

I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#725
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is still finding ways to antagonize its users with Pocket? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I stopped using Firefox when they started pushing Pocket so hard. Maybe I’m remembering too strongly, but my recollection is that when I complained about it I was told this is the future, you’re being a crank, and it’s totally normal for a third party exension collecting data to be baked into a browser that claims to…

That doesn't make any sense. Because they offered a service that you were not interested you switched away and consider the less privacy friendly than a big corporation which runs one of the largest advertisement business in the world and tries to lock everyone into their ecosystem? Seriously, why do you hold Mozilla a nonprofit with a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, to a much higher standard…

> In addition to the information that you provide to us when you register for a user account, we collect information about the URLs, titles and content of the web pages and other information you save to Pocket. The types of information we collect includes your browser type, device type, time zone, language, and other information related to the manner in which you access the Pocket Technologies. If you are on a mobile device, we collect the advertising identifiers provided by Apple on iOS and by Google on Android. [...]

How is Safari less privacy friendly than that? As far as I know, Safari doesn't phone home with my reading list. If it did, that would be completely unacceptable to me. But maybe Apple can defend it by saying "well it's only what the most privacy friendly browser, Firefox, does"?

> Seriously, why do you hold Mozilla a nonprofit with a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, to a much higher standard than the largest corporations in the world with proven disregard (and profit motive to ignore it) for their users privacy?

Do they really have a proven history of putting privacy of their users first? Because to me, Pocket looks like a proven history that they will sell the opportunity to collect data from their users just like any other company.

Even if Mozilla really did have a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, that would in fact be a reason to hold them to a higher standard. I expect more from people I think highly of, than people I know usually do bad things.

It seems to me that Apple actually has less incentive to sell my data than Mozilla. I'm paying Apple for their device and their software, and if I don't like the way their software treats my data, I will stop paying them. Mozilla has no way to make money other than bundling software that collects data from their users (google search default, pocket). So who's really incentivized to ignore privacy concerns?

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#726
"...the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox"

That's pretty rich. Firefox did irreparable harm when they decided to funnel all Americans' DNS lookups to an abusive, monopolistic, for-profit company, Cloudflare, WITHOUT ASKING.

That's sleazy, and every network I manage now has the "use-application-dns.net" canary domain because of this.

No matter how much people try to frame this as, "they're protecting you from your bad, evil ISP", they're doing things surreptitiously, without consent, without any reason to believe Cloudflare, who are happy to host spammers and scammers, is any less evil. "Privacy", my ass.

Address this, Firefox people, and maybe I'll trust you a little.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#727

I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero. These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site w…

Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites. Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins…

Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#728
post #89

>1. Privacy Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data. Mozilla tracks and gives (sells?) unique information about every download to Google unless you choose to grab it from the FTP servers. https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...

> (sells?) An accusation like this would benefit from some evidence. By not offering any evidence, you get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual discussion about it.

Here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

     Firefox by default also sends marketing campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Campaign data includes a Google advertising ID or Android ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version.
Smells like a sale, but by not using the word sell, they get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual problem about selling it.

Re: In 2024, please switch to Firefox

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He actively gave to organizations that were formed to restrict freedom. And the LBGTQ community, we're not going to sit and be quiet about those sorts of things.

> He actively gave to organizations that were formed to restrict freedom. > And the LBGTQ community, we're not going to sit and be quiet about those sorts of things. You seriously don't see the irony in this at all? Retaliation against someone for what they do in their personal lives is... what, exactly, if not restricting freedom? Purporting to speak for an entire community without any authority or consent is... wha…

You're trying to treat a game theory problem as a philosophical consistency problem.

We have a group of Christian Dominionists that would kill us if they could, and only those consequences stop them. (And sometimes, such as the Pulse shooting, not even then.)

In my lifetime, we had these same people saying "thank God for AIDS" and fighting funding for research because they cheered our deaths. There is no moral equivalence here.

Then there is a group that wouldn't explicitly kill us, but actively fights against us having equal rights. Prop 8 was exactly that. Prop 8 was forged to actively tear families like mine apart. We were (and are!) being attacked and philosophical consistency has little use in a firefight.

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