Congrats to Firefox, it really has made substantial improvements over the years.
Firefox a few years ago would kill my Mac battery in a couple hours, now it’s as good as safari for energy management. No reason not to use it as a daily driver now.
Maybe it’ll start maintaining Mozilla again. You know: its namesake project.
It’s called SeaMonkey now and AFAIK it is maintained and under community management.
Yep, I use it every day.
That doesn’t change the fact that Mozilla gave up on its flagship.
I’ll stick to Safari. I don’t trust Mozilla any more than Google or Microsoft.
Ah yes, an open source popular browser that is made by a nonprofit organization is less trustworthy than a close source browser made by a public company
An open source organization with a track record of dubious user-hostile behavior.
Apple does not add plugins to my browser without my consent, nor do they show ads in my browser.
Isn’t Safari made by Apple? It’s not like Apple is some paragon of corporate virtue, why do you trust them?
If you’re running Safari, you’re already running their OS. If Apple wants to spy on you, they’ve already got the means to do so, so you’ve already decided to trust them.
Switching to Chrome or Firefox means trusting one more entity in addition to Apple. This expands your possible exposure.
I’m sticking with Firefox until some dev decides to use it’s engine to make a new better browser. I truly enjoy Arc and Vivaldi, but since they’re chromium i don’t trust them an inch with my personal data.
LibreWolf is an option. It’s mainly just a Firefox fork but removes the adware and sponsored garbage as well as had more privacy-focused defaults, though IMO the defaults are too much and need to be toned back. No ads though so it’s 100% worth the switch.
since they’re chromium i don’t trust them an inch with my personal data.
This is such a ridiculous position. Do you have any evidence at all that every Chromium browser (even the ones specifically designed to avoid this) are transmitting your personal data?
This is such a ridiculous position.
I’m not the original person you responded to, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I disagree. While I personally do not think that all Chromium browsers (especially since there are projects like
ungoogled-chromium) transmit your personal data, I can’t verify this myself because the Chromium codebase is far too much of an undertaking for myself to review.While the same is also true for Firefox (and really any potential open source browser), on a pure personal-trust factor I trust Mozilla/Firefox to be more caring about protecting my personal data than I do Google, who literally revolves around data collection. Inevitably its a moot point for me since I do use Google services anyways, but I don’t think its that far reaching for someone who potentially doesn’t to take the original person’s stance.
While I personally do not think that all Chromium browsers (especially since there are projects like ungoogled-chromium) transmit your personal data, I can’t verify this myself because the Chromium codebase is far too much of an undertaking for myself to review.
Don’t you think that, with so many contributors and projects having eyes on it (arguably more so than on gecko), if there was foul play wouldn’t anyone have sounded the alarm?
Argh, I originally finished typing out a reply and went to upvote your reply - which apparently causes Lemmy to close the reply box, sending my original reply to
/dev/null, sigh…What I was originally going to say, in a more abridged version is that plenty of people audit and review open source libraries such as OpenSSL which ended up having a massive vulnerability that no one knew about in the form of Heartbleed for two years - so while its possible someone would ring the alarm bell on Chromium, its also possible that they wouldn’t (through no fault of their own).
At the end of the day, I still believe that my own personal trust in a project is going to trump the stamp of approval from people that I have zero connection to. There have been countless times in my life where someone said that
Xwas okay, and I blindly trusted them instead of relying on my own judgment only to inevitably bitten in the ass when they ended up being wrong. Even down to medications that I’ve taken in the past that were deemed fine by multiple doctors, which have now resulted in me having permanent negative side effects that I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life.I appreciate your level headed reply (as opposed to the passive aggressive “people do not understand chromium is NOT CHROME” reply), and to your credit I would say its probably significantly harder to forget to remove a ton of telemetry from a project than it is to not catch one line of code that accidentally causes a massive vulnerability to a project - but if Firefox works just fine for me, I don’t see a need to even have to take a (probably small) gamble on Chromium.
I don’t even advocate to others that they shouldn’t use Chromium for the reason that was listed in the top parent comment (usually if someone does ask me how I feel about my choice of browser, I will tell them that I prefer Firefox because it doesn’t have a dominant position of marketshare over web standards), but I did feel it was worth retorting that the parent comment was in fact, not really a “ridiculous position to take”.
Fair enough! FWIW, I also think your stance on the matter is fairly level-headed and well thought out, even if I’m more or less on the other side of the fence.
but they did sound the alarm? Debian took Chromium out of their repos for a time because they found unreported telemetry sent encrypted back to Google. All the info is on the net. You just need to read it.
Brave Browser
Brave is icky. It’s smeared in crypto and they were caught injecting affiliate links in 2020.
Evidence? OF COURSE!
Have you even tried searching for it?
Google even says so for Chromium on its own official page!
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144289/privacy-with-chromium
You don’t need to trust us. Trust Google, they are telling you legally if you want to listen.
Also, look up the handful of open bugs on the Debian but tracker, where known people, with name and faces (I’ve met some on conferences), showcase and share how Chromium calls home and sends encrypted data. They share their Wireshark logs.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=792580;msg=53
Look up how Debian removed Chromium for a time, until some of it got removed upstream.
And all of this doesn’t mean that Google cannot re-introduce it or add different approaches in new updates.
Plus, Google actively creates and pushes for their “standards” via Chrome(ium), which allows them to push for even more surveillance.
In addition, Chromium is not a community project. It’s developed behind closed doors, with a secret roadmap, and a code dump happens on release. That’s no way to develop the 90% of web browser market that society needs in this day and age. But, don’t think you will care about that, do you? you are happy with papa Google for the foreseeable.
Have you even tried searching for it?
Of course I have. I’ve never found any substantiation, which is why I’m asking. I use them every day so I would certainly like to know if there is, but the concerns I constantly see only apply to Chrome, and not Chromium-based browsers.
Google even says so for Chromium on its own official page!
This is specifically for the Chromium browser, not Chromium-based browsers. I know, it’s confusing. Chromium is basically just the open-sourced version of Chrome.
Plus, Google actively creates and pushes for their “standards” via Chrome(ium), which allows them to push for even more surveillance.
This is yet another item attributed to Chrome and it’s users. You can totally create a Chromium fork that adheres to conventional standards.
How hard can you simp for Vivaldi. Jesus Christ.
You don’t think Google themselves admitting that Chromium has the same privacy notice is substantial? What more could you possibly need?
What’s worse is that Vivaldi took an open source browser with a bunch of privacy concerns, added some things and closed the source. And you think it’s somehow less of a cause of concern.
You’re nuts.
Three chrome users said, “nuh uh!”.
If only. Every chrome user said the same thing they’ve said after every other overtake. A poignantly disinterested silence. They just don’t care.
Firefox rules
Chrome drools
Great job Mozilla. I hope that Firefox will one day be as popular as Chrome or even more! ❤️
I’m still using Chrome, but it keeps getting shittier. At some point they’ll push me over to Firefox. Hope Firefox can avoid getting shitty.
While Mozilla is far from perfect, I think they’ve managed to avoid getting shitty for almost 20 years.
That’s because the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. They don’t need to maximize value for their shareholders™.
Thank you Netscape for setting Navigator free!
The Enshitification cycle is a feature of for profit corporations, Google was always going to turn evil at some point.
Somehow it’s always the lead software in a category that becomes shitty while everything else is praised. Regardless of what’s being talked about. (I know why)
People get used to it, it’s “fine” but doesn’t improve considerably or add anything exciting, so people get bored. I moved from Firefox to Chrome, and honestly Chrome feels smoother and uses less ram seemingly for me on my laptop. Aside from no support for vaapi on wayland, chrome is fine imo
Have you tried Brave? Idk the full story, but it is basically chrome with more privacy stuff and is way faster than normal chrome. Feels just like using chrome but faster.
Brave has recently had some controversy around selling user data for AI training and isn’t really a great suggestion for privacy due to this.
How about today? I believe in you. You can do it! Break the cycle. Ditch the Chrome.
my friend actually convinced me to switch just a few days ago lol. i’m just super thankful that i could transfer all my bookmarks and stuff
Once you finish setting up and are happy, if you care about privacy and don’t mind a little more upfront work, set up Multi account tabs. It “sandboxes” your logins and cookies to categories you choose. I have a category for each social media site, one for my finances, one for amazon, one for other shopping, etc.
As long as they can’t manage to make a half-decent mobile browser this hardly matters.
Performance improvements are nice and all, but unless the performance is truely terrible, it’s the least relevant factor.
Much more importent are:
- consistently good UX over all platforms, together with good sync
- good support for all websites
Their Android version is completely useless since the reboot (which is especially sad since the version before was hands down the best UX for a mobile browser on the market). They even dropped their VR version, even though it was literally just their Android version with slightly adjusted UX. They don’t even have any form of tablet UI or Android TV UI.
And since their market share is steadily approaching zero, more and more websites drop support for FF and it’s noticable.
The support part is what really kills FF, since it’s not really in their hands whether web devs test websites with FF.
Lower market share -> less support -> lower market share.
Especially users who “just want the browser to work” are affected by that. They don’t care much about the browser, but about the websites. And if their favourite websites tell them to stop using FF, they will. And that kind of user makes up the biggest part of the market share.
And since FF has no platform where they can push their browser (contrary to all other major browsers), they also won’t get new users.
As much as we would want it otherwise, FF is dead, they just haven’t accepted it yet. And that’s true for almost all Mozilla products and Mozilla itself.
The only way I see how this can be reversed is if e.g. the EU decides that Mozilla and/or its products have some special value and starts funding and pushing them.
Without explaining the actual problems you have with Firefox on Android, your post is really pointless.
Also, “steadily approaching zero” is an intelligent an analysis as saying Edge is steadily approaching 100% just because its share is increasing.
What is actually your problem with Android FF? I use it every day on my phone.
Yes, it’s not as snappy as Chrome, but besides that everything works perfectly. In addition to that: Fully fledged ad-blocker like on desktop, one big reason why I no longer use Chrome on my phone.
- No tablet UI, no tab bar: This is a big downside for me. I set the minimum width on my phone pretty high, so the screen fits as much on there as a small tablet. The lack of tablet UI/tab bar is a pretty big issue
- The tab drawer is a whole mess in itself. It’s really clunky to use, tab reordering (an essential feature if you want to ever e.g. compare products) wasn’t available for a very long time. Now it is, but it’s super clunky to use. And it’s still not available for private tabs.
- There are addons, but since they only allow a very small selection of addons, they boil down to adblockers and dark reader. There is hardly anything else in there, which is a shame, since FF on Android used to support all addons the desktop browser supported. Their “walled garden” approach to addons also hinders anyone from developing addons for FF on Android, because these addons will likely not be added to the curated list.
Compare that to e.g. Vivaldi:
- It’s got a great tablet UI including a tab bar.
- The tab drawer works just as expected, pretty much exactly like in old FF
- It doesn’t have addons, but it has adblock (based on and compatible with uBlock Origin) built right into the browser, same with dark mode for websites. All of the addons that both are available on FF for Android and that I care about are built right into Vivaldi.
- The UI in general is much better. For example, opening a new tab is just one click. Same with switching tabs and closing tabs on the task bar.
- Additionally, Vivaldi doesn’t get a “This page is not compatible with your browser” as often as FF does, and random bugs on websites are also rarer.
The only advantage FF on Android has over Vivaldi is that it’s easier to access the reader mode on FF for Android.
I tried Vivaldi, don’t really even see a difference between the tab drawers. Except Vivaldi does have bigger tab previews and buttons which feel easier to press. The lack of tab reordering in private mode definitely seems like an oversight.
Tabs in tablet mode would definitely be cool too, but I don’t know what the experience is like on tablet.
On Android you can just long press links to open private tab or new tab. Seeing Vivaldi’s feature bloat if a bottom bar with infrequently used buttons that blocks viewing space, and a completely unnecessary tab bar on mobile that wastes space, feels like an ancient outdated design from 5+ years ago.
That’s kind of Vivaldi’s design though, ridiculous feature bloat and cluttering the screen with useless crap instead of trying to preserve screen space when these single press buttons can easily be moved to gestures or condensed. You know, like modern UX design. Like a third of my screen is just gone because of of redundant buttons and UI. Reminds me of Internet Explorer days with Yahoo toolbar.
Just to make sure, we are talking about Vivaldi on Android, correct?
Seeing Vivaldi’s feature bloat if a bottom bar with infrequently used buttons that blocks viewing space
What buttons do you mean? The only two buttons that I see added from Firefox are the history and the adblocker control. Both pretty useful. I also don’t see how they block viewing space. What else do you want to view in the bottom bar?
and a completely unnecessary tab bar on mobile that wastes space
… that can be turned off if you don’t like it. Also it’s an absolute killer feature and one of the main reasons why I chose Vivaldi over FF. If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. I much rather have the option to enable/disable a function than to not have the function at all.
I tried Vivaldi, don’t really even see a difference between the tab drawers.
Try to drag-and-drop a tab. In Vivaldi, it works exactly as expected.
On FF it first goes into the multiselection mode and only if you drag it over its stubbornly clingy dead zone can you rip it from its position. ~1/4 of the time the whole screen jumps to a random position, especially if you have many tabs. If you drag too early, the tab doesn’t get moved at all, but instead the whole screen moves.
Other than that, I see that they fixed some of the jankiness that it had a year ago when I last seriously used FF on Android.
when these single press buttons can easily be moved to gestures or condensed. You know, like modern UX design.
Gestures are one of the dumbest UX decisions possible, because they lack affordability in most cases. Stuff like swipe to reload/go back/go forward is pretty dumb because you trigger it accidentally a lot.
Like a third of my screen is just gone because of of redundant buttons and UI. Reminds me of Internet Explorer days with Yahoo toolbar.
What kind of screen size do you have? On my screen, the bottom bar and the tab row take up maybe 5% of the screen real estate. And again, if you don’t like it, disable the tab bar and make the bottom bar auto-hide.
What is exactly being measured here? Someone care to elaborate what kind of things they kept into account?
Exactly. Also, one might prefer 75, 80% of Chrome’s speed, but also 75% of the battery usage and maybe only 90% for RAM.
I for one would definitely not be against less battery usage on laptop/mobile
I would still use FF for moral reasons but I’d understand if uses it for the things you mention, but saying it’s “faster” isn’t really a good term in this case, faster in what? I mean, I’m not saying this is done in bad faith or anything, but would be even better if we could know that instead of simply clamoring over “fastness”.
