Tiny devils advocate, IF we can make it so ONLY Google can spy on us and
malwareadware can NOT spy on us would be an “improvement”. Google is a lot easier to target with regulation and stuff.That said, I wouldn’t touch Google with a 10 foot pole.
I’ve read so many bs paid-off articles recently how chrome is so much better than firefox, or firefox has nothing left to give to its users
The one feature that I really liked that’s still in chromium other than Google cast is still Web Apps.
I like to be able to make a desktop application out of a web page. Firefox has this feature with PRISM a while back. Did it ever come back?
Let people use whatever they feel like, ffs.
And that is why soon there shall be a monoculture of browser and all control shall be ceded to massive corpo.
Thank Mozilla’s (mis)managemet for that.
So you are supporting the even greater evil to spite Mozilla? It’s not mozilla pushing manifest v3 that will cripple ublock origin.
Yes. Mozilla doesn’t deserve it’s reputation or its status. And I don’t need Ublock Origin. Stopped using it years ago.
I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how many people are willing to defend Mozilla by saying every other corporation pays their CEOs too much too. It’s as if Mozilla can do no wrong, as long as other companies are doing worse somewhere else.
And if that’s the standard people hold it to, well, they’re basically condemning it to have no value whatsoever
No one ever remotely gave mozilla a pass by warning that firefox is the last bastion against a return to the proprietary web we barely fought off with IE6.
I can link to some comments if you want. But I think it’s fair to assume that on the internet, people will come up with the dumbest opinions possible
That’s what I have noticed as well. Mozilla always gets a free pass.
It probably doesn’t help that, up until days ago, the biggest articles written about this were by a guy with a history of wanting Mozilla – and a handful of other companies – to fail, not because of bad behavior but because of a personal/political vendetta. (For comparison, he’s put out content supportive of Twitter despite its CEO.)
I guess it’s easy to say that any critic is one of his sycophants, but I’ve heard the criticism growing louder even within Mozilla’s own communities.
Which is all also irrelevant to the browser behavior.
Actually no, thanks to Mozilla becoming a shittier company, it’s making Firefox worse in the process. For example, since Firefox 119, it’s been shipping with a data-sucking sidebar that it never announced in its release notes.
Off topic remains off topic.
Nope, it is ignorant users misleading other users as the subject is firefox’s behavior and not the corporate behavior just as the reason to avoid chromium crap is the behavior of chromium crap and the actions of googliebet are an entirely different issue just as Mozillas are.
Nobody’s stopping you. Just saying it’s either ignorant or stupid to, and actively makes the internet a worse place.
The internet will do fine, don’t worry. And no, I don’t use Chrome.
People using it, however, won’t.
Your statement means nothing.
What makes you so confident? It’s not as though the internet’s “fine” right now compared to where it was 20 years ago.
EDIT: I see your entire personality is hating Mozilla, and apparently that means people can’t hate Chrome too. Gonna just block this google shill.
20 years ago the Internet was pretty broken if you didn’t use IE.
I see your entire personality is hating Mozilla
I’ve noticed a significant uptick in the number of users here who actively hate on Mozilla. Granted, Mozilla makes some baffling design choices (let me disable the QR code reader in the address bar on mobile FFS), but it’s never about that. It’s always about Mozilla being too “woke” or whatever.
Just the exact caliber of person you’d expect to use a browser such as Chrome, in spite of knowing better, and then to gloat about it.
Are you talking about me? I’ve been on FF for about 20 years, until Mozilla keept pushing crappy changes (despite unfavorable feedback from beta and nightly users). I ditched it in 2021 for something that works better for me. That, plus a bunch of controversies about Mozilla’s (mis)management, made me stop supporting them and advocating for FF. FYI, I don’t use Chrome, even if I use a chromium-based browser. And no, I don’t feel guilty because of this. Whay should I?
Does google listen to your feedback?
I don’t use Chrome
I guess it was more of a general statement. I didn’t intend to target you specifically, just a trend I’ve seen. I’ve seen people link to statements made by Mozilla about things like supporting LGBT+ rights, and taking issue with that sort of thing, or who say they don’t care if the Brave CEO is actively disseminating bigotry. Y’know, the type of person who watches the Quartering and complains that we’ve become too “woke” and too sensitive.
I don’t think you should feel guilty. Even if you’re one of the people I’m describing above, I don’t think you should feel guilty. I just think you should opt to change. According to every therapist I’ve seen, guilt is pretty counterproductive for everyone involved.
I’m all for LGBT+ people rights and whatever. Eich is not my friend and I don’t agree with his personal views. Still, the “tool” they make is more appealing for me than competing “tools”, so…
I don’t actually feel guilty, of course. That was just an overstatement.
LOL, who cares about Google. Take your meds, dude.
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If I cared about upvotes (scores are disabled on my end, btw), I’d simply write “use Firefox” over and over, which is what most people on the fediverse like to do (as if Mozilla was any better, nowadays).
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but see, they wont. thats the problem.
google/microsoft are circling the wagons and are about to prevent anything but chrome and edge to be ‘official browsers’
so, to your point, yes we want everyone to use what they want. but continuing to use chrome will kill the very ecosystem that allows the choice you want to have.
google/microsoft are circling the wagons
MS would love to be a third option. Instead they admitted that they couldn’t keep up with Google’s constant change and proprietary extensions of Web standards that allow Google services to work with Chrome.
So Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.
MS isn’t circling the wagons. They already surrendered to Google’s monopoly.
Those of us that lived through the active X nightmare are well aware of the danger monoculture creates. Shame educating others is considered offensive to the sheep.
Don’t you play Star Citizen?
let people burn tires in their backyard if they feel like it, ffs
One thing is illegal, the other is not. Try a different analogy.
Everything the Nazis did in the Third Reich was legal. People who resisted them were breaking the law. Maybe we should evaluate things by their impact (pollution/invasion of privacy) rather than their legality.
Fine. People, stop buying stuff on Amazon, then.
I like how you say that as if its impossible.
I stopped buying things off of Amazon many years ago because they don’t respect privacy and are unethical.
Well done. Same here.
Now, please actively bother other people (IRL family and friend, not strangers on the internet) they must do the same.
People here on the Fedi seem so eager to teach others what is best for them.
If your morals and ethics hinge on legality, then I’ve got some bad news for you…
I’m not the one making absurd comparison.
You said, “One thing is illegal, the other is not,” which is directly equating legality with ethics/morality.
Edit: If I’m somehow misinterpreting this statement, then perhaps you can explain how legality is relevant here? Everything we do is ultimately an ethical and moral choice. It’s up to us to determine what the responsible choice is. Here I think the choice is pretty clear.
Don’t like Mozilla? Great, then use one of its many forks, such as Librewolf, Waterfox, Mull, Fennec, etc.
I fail to see the lack of morality on chosing a browser over another. People use what works best for them. If for most people what works best is Chrome, well, I don’t feel there’s anything wrong in their choice. Buring tires “is wrong” regardlessly.
My main problem is that I prefer other frontends to Firefox. I mostly use Vivaldi and think it’s great, but of course it’s Chromium based. I read somewhere that it’s just way easier to base a browser on Chrome than it is to base one on Firefox. It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That’s not how it (currently) works though.
There are Firefox forks, but they’re just that: forks with slight modifications. Vivaldi and Arc are basically completely different browsers. Even Orion isn’t based on Gecko, it’s based on WebKit.
Add to that small compatibility issues with certain websites/web apps that aren’t Firefox’ fault, but rather developers targeting Chrome instead of “100 % web standards”. Still, as a user you’ll likely into (small) issues from time to time.
People saying “just use Firefox” have a very narrow view on how any of this works and I sometimes feel like it’s some form of elitism where the cool kids use Firefox and everybody using anything else are “lesser people”. In reality, people have different requirements and priorities. It’s similar to people posting “just use Linux” under every article talking about problems with Windows.
Yes, Chrome and Google sucks, I agree, but there isn’t a single universal solution to this problem.
Writing a new ff UI is pretty easy. The entire UI is written in html at this point. I’m not sure why people would say it’s “hard” to change.
Embedding gecko into something requires work (even that isn’t that hard really, you just have to hand it a gl surface and pass through inputs)
What features does Vivaldi have that don’t exist in a FF extension?
And using a WebKit based browser is still better than using a chromium fork.
I don’t know. I still prefer having vertical tabs, tab grouping, workspaces, web panels, proper loading information, full page screenshots and way more integrated in my browser instead of having to rely on possibly dozens of different extensions that in my testing never provided nearly as good of an experience.
Implementation details matter.
You can get vertical tabs on firefox with custom userChrome.css but it is a nightmare to setup and mozilla is only interested on breaking userChrome with every update lol.
tell me about it! literally the ONE thing keeping me from FF at the moment. vertical tabs are too vital to my workflow at this point to sacrifice.
tell me about it! literally the ONE thing keeping me from FF at the moment. vertical tabs are too vital to my workflow at this point to sacrifice.
I don’t know exactly how to do it, I know you can because when I was in the firefoxcss subreddit there were many posts on how people came up with their own solutions for vertical tabs.
I wanted vertical tabs to save on screenspace, for some reason the default firefox has the biggest top bar of all browsers and it is horrible, this is the userChrome.css that I use, it does what I wanted but it is not vertical tabs:
It is also keyboard centric, I also had to install an extension because firefox (and this only happens on linux) uses alt+number to switch between tabs instead of control+number.
i just remembered this project: https://floorp.app/en/
japanese fork of firefox with lots of features and proper vertical tabs apparently. i’m looking forward to trying it.
check out Floorp: https://floorp.app/en/
Also mouse gestures and tab tiling. Vivaldi has so many useful features baked in that I don’t want to give up.
Vertical tabs: Sidebery. It might actually be better than the Vivaldi native. I havent used vivaldi with vertical tabs that much, its just a work/secondary browser for me.
Gestures: Gesturify. This is just better than the vivaldi native one.
Tab tiling: well you got me on this one. This is actually pretty neat.
To be clear, I like vivaldi as well, it is my chromium of choice but with the above two extensions firefox is chefs kiss.
I’ll take a look, thanks. I’m not thrilled with the idea of using a dozen extensions that could break or become incompatible, but I would prefer to get off of chrome!
For me it is only 5 extensions really which are essential. uBlock Origin, Dark reader, Sidebery & Gesturify & User agent switcher (it can come in handy every once in a while).
P.S. There is a little caveat to vertical tabs which i forgot. You have to follow an easy 5 step guide on how to hide horizontal tabs when sidebery is active.
Personally, I would have preferred the option to hide tabs in Firefox, versus what they’re currently working on… A hidden sidebar that works on only three of America’s biggest shopping websites. Even if they hadn’t developed native vertical tabs to go along with it.
I could never get hardware accelerated video working with Firefox on my Linux laptop, and Google Meet (used for work) doesn’t work well ( but I guess I blame Google for that).
Google meet sucks hard on every browser and piece of hardware I’ve thrown at it.
Why is using WebKit-based browser “better” than Chromium-based one? Neither supports Google’s monopoly. Vivaldi is not just a skin for Google Chrome, it continues to support manifest v2 extensions and proper adblockers. And the company is owned by the workers, which is super cool
Because they foster a web monoculture where the only thing that works are Chromium based browsers. For better or worse Google controls Chromium which means that they will continue to keep pushing it in the direction they want.
I tried really hard to use Floorp which fixes most of my problems with stock Firefox but even that just showed me how excellent Vivaldi is compared to other browsers.
Let me add that support for passkeys is becoming more and more important and Firefox doesn’t support passkeys. Yes, it supports forms of WebAuthn (YubiKey and the likes), but not “scan this QR code with your smartphone and use biometric authentication to sign in”.
People saying “just use Firefox” have a very narrow view on how any of this works
No, not at all. I understand perfectly. Your concerns are valid.
Our point is not supporting Chrome is more important in the long run.
There is no front end in the world that will make up for the loss of true ad blocking and everything else Google pushes down the line.
Let’s be clear about this:
I don’t want to tell you to use Firefox. I want to tell you to use whatever you like. I wish we lived in a world where the choice didn’t matter.
But we don’t
When I’m telling people to use firefox, I’m telling them if you have a problem with the direction the internet is going in, you actually have to do something about it beyond just complaining. Support the competition, the only non-profit in the space, and the only true alternative browser left. Because everything is going to get exponentially worse without competition, and we really really need to preserve the one remaining safe refuge.
Well, you’re not saying just use Firefox, you actually bring up valid points and reasoning. Just look at the top comment of this post stating “Not using Chrome is so easy” when it’s not.
Let me clarify that I don’t hate Firefox, it’s my second most used browser on the desktop after Vivaldi, I just don’t think it’s a great browser with its current feature set. Mind you, as soon as ad blocking becomes infeasible with Chrome and forks I’ll instantly bite the bullet and fully switch to Firefox. But as it stands right now, Firefox is lacking features (some of them almost essential if you ask me, see my comment about passkeys) and compatibility (rarely Firefox’ fault, but rather a result of the Chrome semi-monopoly).
The main problem is that Firefox is the only alternative to a Chromium browser on non-Apple platforms, but it’s not the solution to everyone’s problems. Let’s see if and when Orion is going to get ported to Windows/Linux.
super excited about the future of Orion!!
You admit in the opening of your comment that your issue is preference and then go on to say there’s no single universal solution.
There absolutely is a single universal solution. Either adapt your preference and use a different browser until you’re familiar enough with it to prefer it, or adapt your preference to admitting that you don’t care that Google is getting your data more than you care about being ever-so-slightly inconvenienced. It’s pretty simple.
It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That’s not how it (currently) works though.
Arc has floated this idea. Currently Arc is Chromium-based, but they say they’ve designed it to allow for swapping engines in the future.
IIRC, Edge had a similar feature for a while, allowing you to run legacy Internet Explorer tabs if a site required it. Not sure if that still exists.
I have switched to Firefox but I’m having a hard time. Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome and uses an insane amount of memory. And I really miss tab groups as Chrome had them. There are some add-ons for Firefox that try to imitate this feature but none of them has everything I want (e.g. the ability to collapse a group in the top tab bar). And most of them build on top of Firefox tab groups which come with an isolation feature I don’t want (and haven’t found a way to disable for tab groups).
Lots of people can’t just straight up ditch it. I have had multiple websites just don’t work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put. For me I just go into a Windows sandbox, but there’s people who are not that tech savvy and it’s often forced on them. Also iirc most schools have chrome books they let students use. So it’s basically forced onto people.
Use a Chromium fork instead if you’re having so much trouble. Thorium is a decent alternative.
I have had multiple websites just don’t work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put.
Have you tried to change the browser’s user agent ?
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Do you have any examples? I have used Firefox for years and never experienced this, nor heard of anyone I know who uses Firefox experiencing this.
I use Firefox except for one thing: web serial. Chrome is the only browser that supports it. Luckily you only need it the when setting up an ESP32 for the first time and can do updates wirelessly.
This is the Proxmox console on any of my VMs or LXCs in Firefox. Works just peachy in any Chromium-based browser.
This is fixable. Firefox is blocking HTML5 canvas stuff. I found a screenshot that shows you what to do: https://imgur.com/a/hdvyBtx
Thanks mate. Fixed it right up.
Not the commenter, but…
I play tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder 2e for those care) online with some friends, and we use a website which hosts the program (forge-vtt.com).
For the life of me, I cannot get it to behave on Firefox. Maps will be pitch black while on Chrome they render perfectly. I’ve tried every permutation of browser setting and extension toggling I can think of to no avail.
Tried switching off hardware acceleration?
Yup, that was the common suggestion I was finding, but no luck with it on or off.
Sonys website immediately comes to mind
Trying to get my account back for my PS5 forced me to use edge for it to work at all
And then to use edge on my wife’s PC because something I have installed REALLY pisses Sony off
Today there was a page on my bank that just would not load in Firefox even though the rest of the site was fine. Switched to Chrome and it worked fine. I only use Chrome in these situations.
Oftentimes, when I use Firefox (Main browser on my phone) things just don’t render/show up. One thing I noticed was when I input my area code to find a package distribution center, and it straight up didn’t show. Iirc it relied on Google maps for showing these places.
It worked in Chrome. Not pointing any fingers, it’s just odd, is what I’m saying.
I’ve hit the odd site where a menu doesn’t work the way it should, the payment form doesn’t work, overall form validation is wonky, or the captcha doesn’t work. I attribute most of these to slight nuances in javascript between browsers.
I’m a (old, grey) dev, and I’ve had to shame colleagues into testing in mobile browsers other than Chrome and Safari.
I love iOS, but I gotta bring up that other browsers on iOS are all Safari with a skin.
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If a website or app doesn’t test in Firefox, I avoid it. That’s something I run into like once a year, and I just use edge once if I need to, and avoid that website or app in the future. It’s not hard to support Firefox, it’s just a shitty ass business decision not to
So my gut instinct is to go to Firefox (again), but how can it compete? It’s down to like 2% market share, there’s a serious portion of the web that Firefox just can’t render anymore, and there’s all this press about the CEO getting this monsterous golden parachute.
So realistically what can anyone do but continue to use the only browser people ever really test sites for anymore, or swear allegiance to either Microsoft or Apple?
I am going to be downvoted to hell for this. I use Mullvad Browser/LibreWolf on desktop but on Android I prefer Chromium. I was using Firefox until a couple months ago when I switched back to Vanadium/Cromite. Chromium on Android is very nice. First it has Material You support so it looks much better than Firefox. Second, it loads website faster and it scrolls buttery smooth unlike the noticeably choppier Firefox. Plus it has 120hz on the privacy preserving forks unlike Firefox which is stuck on 60hz with RFP on. Third, Chromium has per-site process isolation on Android so it has better security. I probably won’t be switching back until Firefox catches up on those fronts.
I think people would let every company watch them take a shit if it meant they got dark mode on their app…
You seem to have very high requirements for a mobile browser. None of this have been an issue for me in years of Firefox mobile. Maybe philosophy is worth a little bit of discomfort.
Write it in the fucking sky, my friend.
People need to rediscover what the word “principle” means and why they need to be fought for.
If you care about them, you’ll tolerate a little inconvenience and you’ll put a little time into adapting, maybe even learning.
If you can’t muster any desire to stick to principles, you’ll be in threads like this forever, helpless, and complaining over and over as things continue to shift further in a direction you don’t wanna go in.
For real, people often give the weakest excuses for not trying or changing something. “But, but… I will have to…” like they have never had to do anything hard before.
It’s okay. They can make up for it by wanking about some glorious revolution that they can’t even define much less bring about.
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Yeah, maybe. Felt kinda like betraying my faith or something at first when I switched back lol but I got used to it.
I couldn’t care less about 120Hz when my privacy is at stake. Even if chrome has per tab isolation, I’m sure Google’s got its mittens in there somewhere.
A second load time difference, meh. Not a big deal to me. Same with materialU
honestly I heavily agree, Firefox on android is just a worse and choppier experience and I’d love for it to get a major overhaul to bring it back up to modern standards
With Firefox you can put the search bar on the bottom. Checkmate.
Cromite can do that too actually.
I checked and some article said you need to enable advances options and set some bs flag. Sounds like work but at least it’s possible now.
Does chrome mobile have extension support? Firefox got ublocker these days.
Also how long till google doesn’t let you use an ad blocker. Ublock origin on Firefox is king.
Feels like an ad…
Counterpoint: uBlock origins.
Good point. But I have DNS adblocking so that doesn’t bother me much.
Works but I always found using both is better.
I have been using the same web browser, in terms of codebase, ideology, and heritage, since 1993.
That’s almost a third of a century.
The number of tab crashes in Firefox is way higher than it ever should be. I still use it but it’s def not as stable as the chrome stuff.
I haven’t seen that happen in possibly two years, let alone regularly.
I use Firefox all day on both Mac and Windows and this rarely happens. It does seem to happen on Linux for me sometimes though.
What are you using that makes it crash, virtually never happens to me.
No idea. Nothing crazy. Twitch is one that’s fairly regular but it happens seemingly randomly with normal browsing. It hasn’t happened on mobile as far as I remember.
I send in each crash report so hopefully they’ll be able to sort it out.
For me I had to disable video hardware acceleration (just video, not all acceleration) for Twitch to stop crashing all the time.
hardly any issues here, either. and we abuse tf out of firefox… 300+ tabs? stay open for days on end? multiple addons? on c2d-era desktops? no problem.
For me Firefox crashes all the time in normal use. I am talking minimum twice a day. It also has this weird problem where it will pin one thread to 100% and lock up the whole browser when downloading files. I also had to disable video hardware acceleration or else Twitch crashes every 5-10 minutes but luckily my CPU is so strong that it’s not too big of a deal to do software decoding.
I still use it out of principle but it has been a way worse experience than Chromium ever was for me.
what os/hardware? I too never have an issue but im talking a pc. Is your experience with android?
I am talking about on desktop but actually the Android version of Firefox was such a laggy buggy mess I switched to Brave on mobile.
On my desktop I use Arch btw with a 7950X and a 6900 XT. Honestly after using it for over a year I kind of hate it. I am so fed up with how many small annoying problems it has. Someone else mentioned Thorium in this thread and I might give that a try.
If Firefox works great for you that’s awesome but it is BY FAR the buggiest piece of software on my entire computer.
I have different hardware, but I am running arch with firefox daily. I have had maybe 2 freezes in the last two years. Other than that it works as I would expect. Are you keeping your system updated?
Yeah…I’m gonna say you have something that isn’t playing well with Firefox. Extensions, hardware…. I’ve been using Firefox for years now across multiple OS’s and hardware and I’ve never had anything like this happen to me
I have privacy badger, ublock, dark reader, tab session manager, bitwarden, and grease monkey(that is used to tweak hacker News).
I guess I could try to turn off ublock and privacy badger to see if that fixes anything, but the other extensions seem way less invasive and less likely to be the culprit.
But browsing without ublock seems miserable.
Yeah, more often than not Ublock or others ad blocks are the culprit for me.
And it’s not immediately obvious that such is the case when it happens.
Good luck
Tab crashes with ublock enabled or without?
If without, it’s probably ads/trackers crashing the tab.
I came back to firefox after vivaldi and edge when google announced manifestv3, decided to do it already since they would at best delay it instead of canceling it, and that’s exactly what they did.
Vivaldi user since 2015. Never looked back.
Firefox main since 2020. Love it.
IMHO, people in corporations should acknowledge that there is a growing user base for Firefox and give it as much priority as chrome. That way people in an organization can at least explore a different browser than chrome (especially the non-tech folks).
The reality is that companies test all their websites in Chrome. Any automation testing will also be focused on Chrome and Safari. Also majority of the developers use Chrome dev tools for debugging. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I feel that Firefox is like a second class citizen in their book.
But hey, that might be a good thing too. All the tracking B.S will be developed for chrome and We can continue to enjoy privacy with good old firefox.
