• 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’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
It’s cool just come back and bring a friend with you.
You are forgiven. It’s an adventure.
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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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.
Personally I’d rather stop using any Google services, than handing them a Chrome monopoly. Google is already way to dominant IMO.
You should stop using Google services anyway. They are terrible for privacy and for your digital freedom in general. And there are so many alternatives.
I absolutely try to limit it. I use Qwant for search. I don’t use gmail except to register Android. In android I don’t use google services like calendar. I only use Google play for 1 app that is only available through Google play.
My biggest dependency is probably YouTube, which I must admit I use a lot.Qwant is a good option. AFAIK you can use Android without logging in to a Google account. You can use Aurora Store to anonymously download apps from the Play Store without having to log in. If you have to access Gmail, don’t use their app, it’s full of trackers. Use K-9 Mail instead. For YouTube, you can use LibreTube or NewPipe on Android and Invidious or Piped in your browser. SmartTubeNext is a great option for Android TV. You can also use the Universal Android Debloater to remove any Google apps and services you don’t need.
Thanks, lots of options I wasn’t aware of. 👍 😀
I am trying to slowly quit all Google services
That’s great
I didn’t notice they broke it. The website works on my Firefox as usual. Maybe you lack some plugins? (like ublock origin, sponsor block, age restriction bypass…)
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I still don’t see that they broke FF specifically, they’re fighting back against adblockers, including the ones in browsers like brave.
They added a literal sleep(5000) to the javascript for youtube accessed via firefox.
- Hasn’t been happening on my Firefox
- There have been reports on other browsers as well, so this isn’t a firefox specific issue (p sure I’ve seen some people that use chrome claim they had this issue)
Also, 3. That was meant to target ad blockers, not Firefox users
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From what I’ve gathered from other threads, it’s meant to target ad blockers, not Firefox users. It appears though that Firefox users ended up in the crossfire, while uBO can be rigged to block the
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which site is that? Google search page? it works fine for me in every browser I’ve ever tried it on.
Switch? I never left!
Exactly. I’ve been here since Netscape Navigator.
There are dozens of us!
Same! The extensions are just to damned useful!
Same. Literally been a user since version 1.
Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What’s happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.
I deeply regret leaving.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I had a similar history to you.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
- switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
- switched Google Search Engine to searxng
- switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
- switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
- switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
- switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there’s not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple’s browser engine.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s
I did. Chrome updated plugins automatically, Firefox didn’t. Also one bad tab didn’t kill the whole browser.
Plugins are dead now, so I switched back. I’ve still had to kill FF in task manager, due to some weird PSN login bug.
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.
Totally agree. I also knew this was Google’s modus operandi. The early versions of their software can be amazing and they slowly monetize over time.
I never understood why so many people thought it was a good idea to hand Google the near monopoly power we had just prevented Microsoft in keeping. And that was AFTER we saw how bad it was that Microsoft had that power.
Too many people go for short term gain for way greater long term losses.Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they’re similar now.
This is my recollection, when chrome first came out it seemed significantly faster than IE and Firefox at the time, and Google was much less evil big brother at the time.
Back when it was only really known for Search.
So it’s only feasible to prevent a monopoly now, because it’s convenient? Disregarding the huge inconvenience a monopoly always result in!
Yes, but not because I didn’t try. I tried Opera and Konqueror for a time and they had some serious rendering problems. Being on the Internet all day for work I kinda just need a browser that works. Firefox is that for me now, but it wasn’t always up to the task.
That’s because 99% of people don’t care, exactly the same as with Microsoft. Average person will understand why monopoly is bad when there’s only a single company that sells them gas and suddenly he has to pay $100 per gallon. With tech stuff they simply have no idea. It’s not like they were using IE and thinking ‘It would be so much better if this could pass Acid test’. With Chrome they don’t think ‘it would be nice if this could block youtube ads’ and don’t understand what Google controlling the internet really means. Even governments don’t care about it for the same reasons we do. We don’t like monopoly because of technology and standards. They don’t like it because it slows down economy.
Google took a novel approach of trying to give people a free product that had value to them and features they wanted in a way that was easy to use. Such a product gave a better experience and only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder, something that people have grown accustomed from their governments.
only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder,
That’s a huge misconception of what’s going on. The consequences are way more far reaching, because Google is also a giant in other aspects. If it was only Chrome, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
People really bought into that “don’t be evil” clause they used to have, and I’m actually astounded they bothered removing it. It’s not exactly legally binding, so why not just leave it there and do evil shit anyway?
I feel like it actually got worse after they removed it. Although the signs were beginning to show.
I use Chrome for development purposes only. Dev tools in Chrome are much better still. Firefox dev tools used to be a complete mess, they are better now, but still not a match to Chrome.
But for everyday browsing it’s Firefox for me.
most people don’t give af which browser they use. they trust the brand of google because the search engine was “the best” so they moved from firefox/edge over to chrome thanks to an advertising blitz and deals with vendors to put chrome on laptops, at the time was a better browser and much more stable since it silo’d tabs into processes (which is what almost all browser do now).
Many people that are not very tech minded, are very well aware that Google has become to big, and control and know to much. Yet they use Google services, because they are default, and they don’t know how to change it or use alternatives. That’s probably the case for about 90% of people, which is why defaults are so powerful.
The real idiots are those that know tech, but don’t care.
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.
Have you tried tab session manager? I was planning on testing it to check if it provides additional value…
I have and it’s great.
Also, unlike a lot of people I just delete vast swathes of my tabs from time to time.
Let’s be honest, you didn’t need it and I didn’t need it.
But I’m still gad I can go back to a random tab from a week ago from a session I had closed out of
No I haven’t, but I’m intrigued!
Though loading the saved tree do only from sidebar (ctrl+b). Loading from bookmarks window is bugged, undoes trees upon loading.
Use Vimium add-on and have a pop-up to search your open tab.
Or if you prefer no add-ons or don’t know how to use Vim keybindings then type your search query in the search bar like this:
% my tab title
Right?
The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs
Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It’s frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.
Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.
It does one level of nesting with tab groups. Just drag one tab onto another to start.
Just wanna jump in here an md mention sideberry as an alternativ, does the same thing, but better imo and has tons of customisation options
internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn’t have the tree view :p
I could never get used to tab managers like these IF the tabs are still shown in the top of Firefox.
Simple Tab Groups is something that I can get used to, because it works pretty similar as it does with Safari.
There’s CSS you can apply that hide the tabs, but it’s not a straightforward process to apply it.
I wonder if I could script it? Hmm. (I’ve written a developer environment setup script at work that I could add that to…)
I wish it was the default (or at least a built in option). It’s a bit annoying to still have to use workarounds to remove the default tab bar.
It’s this on Firefox Android?
Pretty sure, the whole sidebar concept doesn’t exist on Firefox Android, so very likely no…
Unfortunately no, but honestly I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and
horizontalvertical screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.I mostly just want a tab grouping system like android chrome had.
I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal screen.
The pages window but with draggable, treeable, tabs/pages.
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.
I never left 😘
Exclusively used chrome browser for ~10yrs. Switched to Firefox last week, cause google being evil.
That behavior deserves more internet points
okay but listen to how evil Google actually is, they have disabled my Firefox browser. It’s simply doesn’t work. It was my default for years and now only Chrome works on my phone 😡 Is anyone else experiencing this?
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”
In the early days when it was first created from the Netscape baseit was definitely branded as Mozilla. Source: I’m old enough to have used it then. Check its wiki page. Covers its early days as an app suite which included the browser.
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 XUL for the browser shell is 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.
If I remember correctly, XUL/XBL is dead. They removed that code a while back after they transitioned to WebExtensions. The current frontend is HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
There are still bits of XUL around but I believe the preference is to use HTML elements wherever possible and they’ve been stripping XUL elements out.
Ooof you thought you were clever, but you just look like a fool on the internet!
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
They are fantastic! Way better than having 6 seperate “browser profiles” open. 🙄
For sure, Aws sso containers is a bloody game changer
I have this extension and I always thought it’s duty was to contain Amazon services from interacting with my other sites i.e., stop Amazon trackers. Can you explain to me more how to use container tabs?
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Earlier, I tried Google Chrome’s “profiles” but damn, how inconvenient they are. I ended up opening multiple windows.
Firefox, on the other hand, only uses a single window for multiple tab containers and accounts.
That’s one reason I like Librewolf so much, it has containers by default
which add on do you use?
I use Facebook Container which isolates any webpage that connects with facebook from the rest of my tabs. It also has separate containers for things like work, shopping, etc you can optionally use for whatever.
It’s very convenient to just open a “shopping” container tab to check my spam email address instead of opening a private window and needing to sign in each time.
When Firefox announced that a ton of their add-ons/extensions were coming to the mobile app, it got me to switch from chrome after almost 15 years.
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.
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Brave is a scam
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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
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inb4 “they added an affilliate link to an exchange 5 years ago,”
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The CEO of brave is a piece of shit that should not be supported or promoted.
Most of us don’t care as long as the product is good. There are a lot more people involved with brave than him who are doing a great job. Unless you can actively show me a shit post history like Trump, I don’t gaf.
Yeah it’s obvious most people don’t care. That’s why things are as shitty as they are. That’s why corps and billionaires have all the power because collectively people will not give up their toys to ensure everyone is treated fairly.
A bad leader with people under them knowing they’re bad makes them bad too.
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You equate antisemitism and shitty business? Hmm…
Yes, some guy having racist ideas somehow isnt as bad ad disrupting a lot of lives while taking a pay raise. There’s always a some degree of evil involved with anything at scale. pick the thing that screws you least.
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I care.
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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.
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The best time was 15 years ago
And the second best time is now.
Nice one. 🌲
The second best time was 14 years ago.
What about 14 years 11 months and 30 days?
That’s the 366/365th or approximately 1.0027th best time.
Well, better late than never.
If it weren’t for the dev tools in Chrome, I never would have switched in the first place. But they got me stuck on it. But I’ve had enough of their shenanigans.
I’ve been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn’t perfect but it’s better than using a browser made by a company that is actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, https://astro.build/ Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
What’s wrong with that page? I’m not seeing anything in particular.
Massive lag on scrolling. Are you not seeing this? I’ll record the screen in a minute.
It was a tiny bit jittery on the first scroll through the page but not very noticeable and it happened in both browsers anyway. That’s about it. I’m on an Xperia 10 III.
sorry I wasn’t sure where to upload the video running a pixel 7 pro it’s hard to come across on video but it is there. hitching/jittery/lag on ff, perfectly smooth on chrome
i’m surprised by the comments, everyone has been having mixed results
I wonder if they aren’t using the “stop and look at image” - trick with css/js. So when you scroll you’re supposed to center on the next image. Also stops the scrolling to center
Could be but I don’t think so in this case. It seems (based on no evidence - purely feel) that there’s some kind of event listener being triggered every time the page scrolls (whether this be touch/scroll event, visible contents, etc idk) and this event listener has different optimisation or performance characteristics depending on the device and rendering engine.
That’s jittery. What’s causing that?
I honestly have no idea of the root cause. Different users are reporting different things. It seems to manifest differently for everyone. At a high level I would say it’s due to the use of a JavaScript framework as a purely static HTML/CSS only site should not be doing this.
I see no difference between mobile chrome/Firefox?
A lot of people have been saying this, some have been saying it lags in chrome, and some have been saying it lags in firefox. I’m interested to know what device you have and perhaps what refresh rate your display runs?
60hz Android 11 Xiaomi
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.
No, they will simply stop funding mozilla.
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.
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 would say that’s most likely ileagal
I can practically hear the EU Commission stoking the furnace as we speak…
Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
and waterfox!
and mullvad browser!
I think you mean mull not mullvad :) Mullvad does not have a browser, the privacy hardened Firefox mobile fork available on F-Droid is actually called Mull and is not related to Mullvad in any way. It confused me too at first.
+1 for Waterfox
Waterfox Elevator pitch?
Water is like cooler than fire, duuude.
This is the first I’m seeing it, and it looks interesting. I’m always up to try a new browser. And it works on Linux too. If the language can be toggled to English I’ll definitely try it.
Their website is in Japanese but everything in the browser itself was English by default when I started using it!
Awesome, thank you for letting me know. That was really the sole concern I had, and it looks very promising. Thank you!
