• 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.

  • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • the_q@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        The CEO of brave is a piece of shit that should not be supported or promoted.

        • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • the_q@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              10 months ago

              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.

            • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              10 months ago

              Antisemitism? What? what are you talking about, we are talking about opposition to same sex marriage. You can think whatever you want, we live in a free society. Now, it is different if I approve or not that idea, but who cares???

          • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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

            • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              10 months ago

              you won’t get one “they heard it” The political bias here is real. Seeking the truth is more important than beliefs.

            • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              10 months 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…

      • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          10 months ago

          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.

  • Uplink@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • helmet91@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Dublin112@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        One of many articles from the time.

    • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      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)

    • Patch@feddit.uk
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      10 months ago

      I can practically hear the EU Commission stoking the furnace as we speak…

    • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      which site is that? Google search page? it works fine for me in every browser I’ve ever tried it on.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • arc@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.

        1. Netscape Navigator
        2. Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
        3. Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
        4. 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
        5. Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
        6. NGLayout becomes Gecko
        7. Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
        8. Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
        9. A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
        10. Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
        11. AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
        12. 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.
        13. Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
        14. 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.

        • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • arc@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            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.

  • bloopernova@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Tree. Style. Tabs.

    Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.

    • edric@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.

      • bloopernova@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • lzbz@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      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

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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

      • bloopernova@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • bloopernova@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        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…)

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

  • grimacefry@aussie.zone
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • Elias Griffin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Mozilla Foundation fronts Mozilla Corporation which is for-profit and brings in nearly a Billion in revenue.

    Don’t donate, do harden it.

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • FrostKing@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Anyone who tried it a year ago, this comment is to tell you that Firefox has improved by orders of magnitude in the past year/years. I recommend trying it again.

    • Nath@aussie.zone
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • paf0@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they’re similar now.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

  • Gomiboy@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • sock@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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

  • stifle867@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    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).

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • 𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.