With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
Chrome does suck regarding privacy.
But the article shared here is basically an ad for Firefox.
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
I’ve been using the internet since 1999. I’ve been using Firefox before it was Firefox, and before it was Phoenix, back when it was just “Mozilla”. (The original browser became SeaMonkey, but it’s been slowly abandoned to the point that it doesn’t work on modern sites anymore.) I’ve been frustrated at times and have sometimes used Chrome, Waterfox and Epiphany (Linux web browser) at times but I always come back to Firefox. Back in the Geocities era in 2000 Netscape 4.x was so poor at CSS I developed for Internet Explorer on my personal sites, (to my regret), but Mozilla eventually caught up.
What about LibreWolf, a fork of FF. Suppose to be better for security. Love using it !! Ditched Brave a couple of days ago
I switched back to Vivaldi recently after I learned about the workspaces feature they added. Will probably use this until Arc comes out for Windows, and then switch to Stack Next when that’s had a lot more development.
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 to be enabled. With this, Microsoft and Chrome have built a complete end to end DRM to the BIOS and hardware level.
This gives the end users nothing but is wonderful for Hollywood.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
Firefox is alright, it served me adequately after Opera got sold off, but Vivaldi is so much better.
Even though it’s based on a fork of chromium Vivaldi has an extremely strong focus on innovation as well as privacy, they’ve commited themselves to working around Mv3 for instance and their in-built ad-blocker is absolutely top notch but you can also install uBlock Origin to work with it in tandem on their desktop browser if you want.
And even though it’s extremely feature rich, with speed dial, ad-blocker, password vault and side bar being some of their out of the box features all their power user functions are opt in through the settings where you can choose to stack your tabs vertically or enable mouse gestures (couldn’t live without these) and a whole bunch more, it really offers everything you could think of and probably a whole bunch more.
Has Firefox gotten the feature to group or stack tabs together? I used to use Firefox and that was the main reason I moved to a chromium based one (Currently Vivaldi). I just need that 90% of the time
I only ever tried Chrome on school computers but it was useless, always kept crashing.
Interesting. I switched to Firefox and will stay there, but I must say, Chrome is the most polished browser I’ve used. Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
The Android version is clunky as hell, also.
Not to mention they finally fixed an issue with the print dialog in Firefox after months and me reporting it every single update.
Still sticking with Firefox, though.
You’re getting downvoted for an opinion, but I’m upvoting you because I actually want to know the downsides of switching, because I’m considering it myself. Is there any truth to what you’re saying, or do people just not like you saying something bad about firefox? I don’t mind downsides to switching, I’d just like to be aware of them first so I don’t get surprised and frustrated.
Everytime Firefox updates I have to restart the entire browser or it won’t let me open a new tab. This has been going on for years. As a dev, I can’t dynamically edit source during runtime ever since the Quantum update. It’s noticeably slower these days, which is especialy bad on mobile/laptops due to battery life. If you’re on Windows, you don’t get video super sampling (NVIDIA) or HDR videos.
I wouldn’t call it a buggy mess that crashes frequently, but it’s certainly constantly getting on my nerves.
Shouldn’t you have to restart the browser when it updates? Isn’t that normal? That’s how Chrome works? Or do you mean it doesn’t save your browser tabs for whenever you opens, or?
The no-hdr videos might be a deal breaker for me on PC… I watch a lot of videos. Thanks for mentioning this.
I mainly use Firefox (on both Linux and Android), but I also use Chrome regularly. I wouldn’t describe Firefox as buggy or clunky. On the whole, I find Firefox more pleasant to use than Chrome on its own merits—nothing at all to do with privacy or Google.
I do agree that Chrome is more performant on JS-heavy websites, but not so much so that I find Firefox sluggish by comparison. And both slow down significantly once you have lots of tabs open.
I prefer Firefox’s tab UI to Chrome’s, both on desktop and mobile:
- Firefox on desktop will scroll the tab bar horizontally once you have enough tabs open, meaning you can still see the title of each. Chrome will keep on shrinking your tabs until each is just an icon, making it really hard to tell between different pages on the same site.
- The “tab groups” feature of Chrome on Android confuses me and isn’t intuitive at all IMO. Firefox just has a traditional list of tabs, which I find much easier to use.
I also love Firefox’s screenshot tool. It’s so much nicer than taking a screenshot via the OS:
- It lets you screenshot an entire page even if it’s too tall for the screen.
- It lets you select specific elements on the page precisely.
- If you invoke it through the developer console, you can take high-DPI screenshots even if you’re using a low-DPI monitor. It’ll re-render the page for you behind the scenes.
Firefox also has way better (read: any at all) hardware video decoding support on desktop Linux than Chrome does. Some distros patch Chrome to add that support, but Firefox has it in official builds out of the box.
I started using Firefox on Android because my old phone (Nexus 5X) was very RAM-constrained and Firefox seemed to kick fewer other apps out of RAM than Chrome did. I now have a newer phone where RAM isn’t an issue, but I still use Firefox, mainly for uBlock and because it can sync tabs, bookmarks, and history to Firefox on my desktop. It runs just as smoothly as Chrome does in my experience.
This is all my personal experience, though. I have experienced frustrating Firefox bugs in the past that make it crash or freeze, and it sounds like GP is currently experiencing one such bug. But I’ve used Firefox for over a decade and probably only encountered 3-4 such bugs. Each time, once I got frustrated enough to go digging, I found an existing upstream bug report describing the root cause and a workaround to use until a proper fix landed (usually within a couple releases). I’ve used Chrome a lot less regularly, so I don’t know if the experience there is comparable or if they do just have better QA for bugs like that. Either way, I think the benefits of Firefox for me outweigh the occasional bug that gets through for a few releases.
Thanks a lot for this detailed run down! You’ve done a good job filling in the blank spots for me, and convinced me to download the app. I forgot that there was a desktop version as well, I’ve only been thinking of mobile! I have noticed YouTube videos look worse when streaming from my PC vs on the TV apps …it’ll be interesting to check if Firefox does better because of what you said about the video.
My guess would be that calling it a weird buggy mess that freezes all the time does not line up with most people’s experience.
I’ve been using Firefox since before it was Firefox and have no idea what he’s talking about.
Firefox had multiple full rewrites because it was losing marketshare due to performance. They market this as quantum and they are very up front about it.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quantum/
I’m glad your experience with firefox has been perfect for decades. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
I never said it was perfect, I said your “weird, buggy, freezing mess” assessment didn’t align with most people’s experience.
I remember the quantum rewrite, that was 6 years ago, not terribly relevant today.
I also don’t blame Firefox for Google screwing with non-chrome browsers. We saw the same thing 20 years ago with IE.
Performance is worse in general. It’s something you’ll have to try for yourself, but websites generally load worse on Firefox.
Some Google websites will intentionally block you, or serve you older pages if you’re on Firefox. Using a plugin to modify your agent string is a work around, but also makes it seem like you’re using Chrome within their analytics which isn’t a good thing.
Like I said, firefox had a bug where printing shipping labels wasn’t working. Took me months of reporting before it was just recently fixed. No one ever acknowledged my issue, and still to this day the bug report was never marked as fixed. I had to run my company from a chromium based browser for months because of it.
The Android app is ass. It’s so clunky and runs like crap. At least it has ublock origin, which is nice. Only recently did firefox finally get pull to refresh, and it’s a buggy pile of crap lol.
I think it’s good to use Firefox. Chromium based future isn’t a good thing, and Chrome is evil trying to block ad blocking with manifest v3, and being literally the only Android browser without ad blocking. Even chromium based Edge has ad blocking on Android.
People on Lemmy are hard core enthusiasts at the moment. I think anyone that says anything negative about things enthusiasts are really passionate about, like Firefox, Linux, etc, will be downvoted.
I think it’s important to not be a fanboy and to be aware of shortcomings. I’m not against Firefox. It’s the only browser I use now, and I highly suggest everyone give it a try, but I’m also not going to pretend it’s some amazing experience. It’s clunky, but it’s run by a good foundation, has some neat features Chrome doesn’t, and it’s helping prevent an even larger chromium monopoly. Give it a go! Just be aware it’s not perfect, and I think you’ll be more likely to stick with it long term.
The way it’s seeming after reading some of these replies is I may end up just having both browsers installed and swapping depending on what I wanna do… Not ideal, but I think it’d be better than all Chrome all the time. Thanks so much for the info
Definitely the best approach. Use both, pick the one that works best for you. I use Firefox, but when I require a chromium browser, I load up Edge.
I’ve been a Firefox user for ages on all my devices and I have no idea what you’re talking about
Which part?
Firefox doesn’t handle media playback as smoothly as chromium based browsers do. This is because of the codecs and plugins Firefox uses instead.
Firefox on Android is very clunky. Pull to refresh was in the beta for years, and they finally just released it into the main branch and it’s bugged to shit. It was a meme how long it was in development and still doesn’t work right, despite every other browser and app having pull to refresh work perfectly.
I want to be clear, I exclusively use Firefox and think chromium is dangerous for the web. I’m just not going to lie and act like firefox is perfect. If it was, it would have larger marketshare. There’s a reason Chrome, despite being a privacy nightmare, is still at the top. There’s a reason nearly every browser is chromium based.
I think being open about the shortcomings and experience you have with software is healthy. Good for development and good for making new users switch. Being critical is a good thing!
Preach, brother.
I love Firefox for all its customization and configuration. I use it exclusively on my personal machine.
That said, Chrome is objectively the better browser for 99% of websites.
If only Firefox’s management had its head screwed on better. I really don’t care about Turning Red themes, I have a KDE theme just to keep it matching my desktop. Just make the core browsing experience better. Hell, take some features from Vivaldi. I’ve noticed a good portion of Vivaldi users back when I used Reddit were former Firefox users, and I can understand why.
I prefer Vivaldi over Firefox. More features, better customizability.
But the again I might be the only one…
There is a lot of misinformation and people linking articles they haven’t really read. I’m not going to address them because I don’t feel like it.
I would suggest for anyone who doesn’t like how slow and clunky Firefox is, to look into Ungoogled chromium. If you still decide to switch to Firefox, consider librewolf if you are ACTUALLY concerned about privacy and not just jumping on the bandwagon of hating Google ITT
At least the guys at Tumblr are promoting Firefox through femboy and furry memes.
