- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
I never left 😘
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can’t go back.
Brave has the best mobile experience IMO. Built-in dark content (this is gamechanger, dark reader is broken on FF mobile, slow and breaks pages), background playback (though this has FF also), very fast, more than FF. Powerful rust-written adblocker (though UBO is better but is slow and broke some pages on mobile). The only thing that could improve more is extensions capacity.
Brave is a scam
Reasons and source?
inb4 “they added an affilliate link to an exchange 5 years ago,”
I need more up to date reasons lol. We are in 2023, on those times brave hasn’t even the 0.0001% of market share…
you won’t get one “they heard it” . I prefer firefox because I’ve used it for almost 2 decades and know it inside-out, but brave is solid too. As long as it remains open source I’m fine with it , and it’s my “chrome backup” when a page is designed for chrome
you won’t get one “they heard it” The political bias here is real. Seeking the truth is more important than beliefs.
ublock is not slow, the difference between it and rust is insignificant if you look at page load time data with a similar set of block lists.
I am talking about Firefox ANDROID. Brave have native adblocker, it’s not for the fact that Rust is fast (that is), its because it’s native. the same way dark reader slows down dramatically some sites on ANDROID. Chromium have native dark mode for contents.
How is this going to end?
Google blocks access to it’s services for Firefox altogether? Maybe even ban it from the Play Store? That would finally give me a real incentive to install some CFW.
I know this isn’t a popular view, but as for me, if Google makes the user experience worse (or blocks services entirely) for Firefox, I’ll just stop using those services. I’ll find alternatives for the essentials, and those that aren’t essential… well, hello, extra free time.
It was a thing of the past, when different browsers rendered websites differently, thus some services didn’t work in certain browsers.
Nowadays all browsers are pretty advanced, they render websites more or less precisely according to standards, so it’s really not hard to make a website work in all major browsers. So if a service doesn’t work in the browser of my choice (whether it’s intentional or not), then that service sucks and isn’t worth my time messing with it.
No, they will simply stop funding mozilla.
I would say that’s most likely ileagal
In the US, without net neutrality I believe it’s completely legal. I remember seeing a report on The Steven Colbert show about a year or so after we lost net neutrality about how Comcast deemed Netflix wasn’t paying them enough money so they throttled Netflix into the ground. This gave the appearance that Netflix services were crap in comparison to their own services like Hulu. About a month later they came to an agreement and Netflix paid up then magically speeds were restored to about the same as Hulu services.
Well yes but then it would be really really hard to not have an antitrust charge bought (we know that various governments have been trying to not pursue any antitrust so far)
I can practically hear the EU Commission stoking the furnace as we speak…
that’s fine, we’ll find a way. I mean they could start some kind of clumsy certification thing, but I’ll just move on and open up brave when I absolutely have to, otherwise they get no attention from me. I bet ublock traffic is less than a half a percent of their traffic.
Personally I’ve never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I’m happy it’s still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.
there was a while there if you used more than a few extensions you’d have a lot of issues. Also there were tons of issues over the years where there were some massive memory leaks. It has gotten much better since then with quantum and electrolysis.
your memory might not works very well since it was never called plain “mozilla”
Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.
- Netscape Navigator
- Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
- Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
- Netscape open sources Netscape Communicator 5.0 as Mozilla with the proprietary bits & crypto stripped out. BTW Mozilla was the internal name of Netscape exposed in the user agent and easter eggs like about:mozilla
- Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
- NGLayout becomes Gecko
- Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
- Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
- A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
- Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
- AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
- Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn’t use so much XUL in the browser but is still the Mozilla / Gecko code base. It proved popular because it was more focused and loaded a bit quicker.
- Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
- Firefox progresses to where it is today.
So yeah it’s a continuation all the way back. I also worked at Netscape at the time so I got to see much of this transition.
I recall the switch from Mozilla to Firefox as being a huge improvement not just in loading time, but the user interface felt much less sluggish overall and keyboard navigation was better. To me it felt like they had ditched 80% of the code base to make a lean, mean browsing machine. Both browsers were around for a couple of years so Firefox seemed more like a fork than a rebrand.
The way Mozilla worked and Firefox still works is there is a cross platform front-end implemented in XUL which is XHTML, CSS and Javascript. The engine underneath is the same (Gecko) but the frontend app over the top is what the user sees and controls buttons, menus, functionality.
Firefox was basically a fork of Mozilla stripped of the not-browser stuff and a cleaned up UI. It proved popular as a prototype so it grew into its own thing and Mozilla suite was abandoned. There is still a Seamonkey project that keeps Mozilla suite alive but it’s outside of the Mozilla foundation.
The reason it’s faster is that Mozilla was an entire suite expressed as a lot of XUL so it impacted loading times. XUL also had this neat trick that you could overlay XUL over the top of other XUL so the mail app was injecting buttons, menus and whatnot into the browser and vice versa. This was cached but it still had to be loaded. In addition and probably just as impactful, was that Mozilla shipped as dynamic libraries (DLLs) and a relatively small EXE, so it took time to start. In Firefox, the number of DLLs was reduced with static linking so it was more efficient to load.
Just because Google broke the most trafficked site on the internet for Firefox doesn’t mean its a bad browser. Hell that’s a ringing endorsement.
which site is that? Google search page? it works fine for me in every browser I’ve ever tried it on.
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.
Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.
Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I’m often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can “file away” a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.
I’m not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don’t see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it’s really nice. Most of the time you’re opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.
Specifically any job over the phone, it’s almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
Don’t get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don’t last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that’s a sign they should be cleaned up.
On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.
Moved from Netscape to Firefox and never used IE or Chrome. I never understood the obsession with anything made by Google, glad its going to finally all fall apart for them.
There was a tiny window of time back before like 2010 where Google was legitimately a good choice. At the time Chrome came out, Firefox was having some notorious performance/bloat issues, and conversely Chrome was light and fast. Lots of stuff that came out around 2000-2010 from Google was legit best in class, and they were still generally in their “don’t be evil era.” That’s obviously gone way out the window and has for some time. I started switching away from Google stuff around the time they killed Reader, and I’m glad I did because they’ve only gotten increasingly awful.
Google dorks are game changer for OSINT things.
You’ve been playing the long game!
Mozilla Foundation fronts Mozilla Corporation which is for-profit and brings in nearly a Billion in revenue.
Don’t donate, do harden it.
Mozilla Corporation is technically for-profit, but they are committed to investing all of their profits back into Mozilla Foundation. They have no shareholders. It exists so that Mozilla can make money off of their products and reinvest it, not to make money for its executives.
Donate to the development of Librewolf instead.
It was never a good time to switch to Chrome.
When it was released, Chrome was revolutionary. Sandboxing individual tabs into their own processes was a stroke of genius. Until then, if a single site ate up all your memory and crashed your browser, all your tabs/sites died and you had to start again.
It really was the best browser for a hot minute before others copied the idea.
Switched back in the summer for good. Use Firefox in my android as the default browser with DuckDuckGo as search engine. The issue is still relying on the android digital hemisphere as the default OS for my phone.
Edit : The only thing lacking is tab management. I know there is an extension. But it doesn’t satisfy.
For people asking, add-ons work fine on Nightly.
It’s getting more and more like chrome.
I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing
When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.
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Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
and waterfox!
Firefox is Awesome