Privacy, real ad-blocking, and fighting for the open web. Also, actually being free software.

Are they the most privacy respecting? no.

are they privacy respecting ENOUGH? sure

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Because I have no other viable option.

I’ve been using Firefox since 2002 when it first became available, at that point it was called Mozilla. It’s definitely the browser that I’ve used the most in about 25 years of browsing the Internet from home. Firefox has a great native Linux version and seems to be widely promoted by most distros. Since switching to Linux seven years ago I also started using Chromium (not to be confused with Chrome) and Opera, both of which also have great native Linux versions.

It came preinstalled.

Because it’s what my father installed and set as default on all PCs. By the point I had my own and could have made the decision myself, I was just so used to it that I didn’t wanna switch.

The ideological conviction came later.

Because Chrome is unfiltered corpo shit and Brave is owned and operated by right-wing assholes peddling cryptocurrency.

I remember when Netscape was abandoned and open-sourced as Mozilla, and it was huge and bloated as slow as hell. And out of that came a project to just pull out the browser part of Mozilla and make it super fast and as portable. I remember a series of early alphas, and even the name went through a few evolutions. First it was called Phoenix, then Firebird, briefly, until they realised Firebird was taken and changed it to Firefox. It had this shiny new Gecko rendering engine and its only rival was IE…5?

When I started my first dev job in 2006, Firefox was far and away the best browser to use because it had an extension that no other browser could match: Firebug. Firebug was the precursor to the standard F12 devtools that every browser now has and it was life-changing if you were a web developer. (Try imagine doing your job without it now.)

Then Chrome arrived and it was shiny and W3C compliant (yay!) and you could pull a tab off into a separate window (wow!) and every tab ran as a separate process (neat!) and Google wouldn’t be evil for at least another decade. Back then, FF had memory leak problems and that drove a lot of us away.

And then Chrome pulled this ad surveillance shit and I was fucking out. I’m so glad that FF is still here.

I let myself be fully engulfed by the Google/Chrome/Android continuum and it’s only recently that I realised just how much of myself I gave away and, while my personal data has long since been propagated to a million servers, I’d still like to try keep some of myself to myself.

My back hurts.

Because the fire, and the fox

It’s the only other option

Vivaldi is my main browser of choice but Firefox is my backup. I’m logged into both and have sync enabled and have them installed on Linux and my Android.

If a site doesn’t work on Vivaldi, I’ll try it on FF.

Cause there is no alternative. Google can take my fiery fox from my cold dead hands.

It’s not chrome / chrome-based. We need to have any choice. As Chrome is very, very loved by corporations, and Firefox hated… it means that for personal use it’s the best browser available.

Because the options are firefox, chrome, or chrome in a moustache and glasses

All of which I use because X thing doesn’t work on Y browser