'Why I'm Switching From Chrome To Firefox and You Should Too' (fastcodesign.com) 337
An anonymous reader quotes an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design:
While the amount of data about me may not have caused harm in my life yet -- as far as I know -- I don't want to be the victim of monopolistic internet oligarchs as they continue to cash in on surveillance-based business models. What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox... [W]hy should I continue to use the company's browser, which acts as literally the window through which I experience much of the internet, when its incentives -- to learn a lot about me so it can sell advertisements -- don't align with mine....?
Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster...
Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't.
The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar.
"But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."
Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster...
Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't.
The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar.
"But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."
Palemoon (Score:4, Informative)
Try Palemoon instead.
Have you forgotten what the Firefox dolts did with their stupid Mr. Robot promo plugin?
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Mozilla is imploding under incompetent leadership. Decision after decision is stripping away everything that made Firefox great. Sure it has better privacy by default than Chrome but it also has its fair share of privacy nightmares. As an example, most people don't know they're signed up for "experiments" by default and these experiments are *exempt* from Mozilla's privacy policy. There is little to no oversight over what is collected or how it is used.
Palemoon might be good but it doesn't have the deve
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There's room for a lot of competition in several i
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I've been seeing a lot of this message of "Switch to Firefox" lately. I'm guessing a bunch of fanboys are trying to make rust relevant (It lives or dies with firefox).
What I've found with rust evangelists is that there's often bitterness that no one is really that interested in their language.
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Palemoon maybe superior... but without a large number of developers behind it that's largely meaningless.
If few devs are making the great addons that users want and the devs that are there are focused on keeping up with security/standards implementation then it will remain feature poor
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As an enterprise web developer, Pale Moon completely collapsed under me. I was forced to remove it unfortunately. I continued to develop under FF, and verify under Chrome. And Edge (UGH lol).
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Collapsed in what way? Do you mean physically? You sat on it? Maybe try not to sit on delicate software in the future.
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I should have been more clear. Its Javascript and debugging were behind the curve and it was keeping me from things I needed to do.
Re:Palemoon (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF is with people dumping on Firefox? It used to be slow and bloated, until the release of Quantum. With Quantum, Firefox is at least as fast as Chrome. Pre-quantum, having many tabs open was guaranteed to bring my computer to its knees. Post quantum, opening many tabs is no problem.
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Re: Palemoon (Score:2)
Yeah - even the difference of 4 seconds vs 2 seconds on different browsers would more likely mean someone is mining bitcoins on your browser: and failing to do so in the faster browser.
In the non-malware case the difference is less than 10% of loading time.
Re:Palemoon (Score:5, Informative)
This was my exact argument -- until I finally took the plunge and updated to FF57. Yes, there were a couple of must-have extensions I HAD to wait for (NoScript, Nuke Anything, Web Developer), but they all came online and I made the change.
I quickly realized that I was totally wrong and was just being stubborn.
To those who suggest Palemoon or other pre-FF57 forks: Stop kidding yourself. You're riding on a slow, sinking ship that's losing support by the day.
Instead of staying on the FFork Titanic, try the following: Let go of every extension you haven't used in a few months and see what's left. If there's anything left with no Quantum version, try a close clone of the functionality. When you get to a good middle ground, make the jump. You'll realize that the speed/performance difference is BIG - and you won't be able to go back and be happy anymore.
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Stubborn? Maybe a little. After all, I still write desktop utility apps in VB6, using tons of tricks, low-level APIs and COM interfaces to implement modern features, because I'm mad about
Ok a lot stubborn but with full justification, I shall resist the Chromification and XUL removal in Firefox until the day the very last workaround fails and the internet becomes unusable!
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Just thought I'd chime in and say that performance- and feature-wise Firefox is one of the top browsers, along with Chrome, which however because of it's much better policies and intentions I definitely prefer Firefox.
Yes the upgrade to Quantum was not completely smooth. I notice that many Quantum-compatible addons are not as flawless as pre-Quantum ones, but overall performance is vastly better. For the better performance and stability the tradeoff seems worth it although one hopes that the addon quality
SeaMonkey! (Score:2)
Don't forget https://www.seamonkey-project.... [seamonkey-project.org] ... V2.49.3 currently uses Firefox v52 ESR's Gecko engine. :D
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PaleMoon is good; Vivaldi is better. IMHO.
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Re:Palemoon (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla is dead to me.
... Well, if that's the line you want to draw then what isn't dead to you? Is your son using Seamonkey now?
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
The noscirpt dev had plenty of time to get his shit together before the update, it's not like Mozilla didn't tell people about this. At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
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Re: Palemoon (Score:3)
So kids are qualified to select which scripts are safe to run ?
Anyway, you went wrong in 2 places :
1. Security updates, in a multi layered security model, are not as urgent so as to risk untested changes on "kids". Noscript was part of that multi layered security model : if kept configured properly.
BTW multi layered is the only color security comes in.
2. It was not a " risk ", but a certainty if the "administrator" knew about documented policy of the software they are "administrating".
Software updating them
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You should really have your son on the ESR channel as Firefox updates and breaks things very regularly, like every 6 weeks.
As they continue moving away from Gecko, breakages are even more likely.
Personally I use SeaMonkey, which currently has automatic updates turned off, to hard to keep up with Mozilla's changes to Firefox
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The problem is that Mozilla has decided to copy Chrome in too many ways, including the frequent updates. I don't have Chrome available here but I'd assume the same dangers exist with Chrome due to the frequent updates. Of course Mozilla has decided to change their rendering engine, so more breakage is likely and as you experienced, happening.
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I've just stuck with 56. /usr/bin & updated normally, but 55.0, 56.0, & 52.4.1esr are in ~/opt
ff is in
It's rare (never, actually) that I need to use current.
And yeah, noscript is what did it for me.
The more I read about the antics at mozilla the more it seems that 56 is the "last version that doesn't suck"
oldversion.com only seems to go up to 45, but mozilla will still let you download the entire history. Hope somebody mirrors it before they take it away.
Ref here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
a
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Re:Palemoon (Score:5, Informative)
One option to at least help - use a different web browser for Facebook and other social surveillance sites. At least then they can't easily connect your browsing habits with your account. And a bit of a tangent, but I refuse to install any such surveillance apps on my phone. Bad enough they do their best to track me online - no way I'm letting them harvest my contacts and physically track me throughout the day.
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this is the idea of Qubes. I didn't think I'd be able to use it as my primary OS, but set myself a challenge to use it on a month-long trip to the UK, surprisingly it worked out pretty well and I use Qubes now as my main OS.
Re:Palemoon (Score:5, Informative)
One option to at least help - use a different web browser for Facebook
Another option is to use Firefox's Facebook Container [mozilla.org]. It's an easy way to separate Facebook [mozilla.org] from the rest of your browsing activity.
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One option to at least help - use a different web browser for Facebook and other social surveillance sites. At least then they can't easily connect your browsing habits with your account.
Right, since they would never be smart enough to connect you by your IP address.
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switch? (Score:5, Insightful)
>" What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox."
Many of us, myself included, have NEVER used Chrome and still use Firefox on all our systems. Yes, that is a no-brainer if you value your privacy.
In the earlier days of Chrome, Firefox performance stagnated and Chrome was fast and lean. But that was less of a concern to many of us. Still, many switched primarily for that reason (with apparently no concern about closed binaries and privacy). Well, that reason is certainly gone now!
Oh, and make sure to not use http://google.com/ [google.com] for searching.... another no-brainer. I would recommend http://startpage.com/ [startpage.com] or similar. Same results, no tracking.
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My thought too. Switch, eh wot? I never had any reason to stop using the Fox.
I tried Chrome. I even wanted to like it, but I just kind of... didn't.
Thanks for the link to startpage.com, will try that for sure.
Chrome performs ten times faster on this test (Score:2, Informative)
https://testdrive-archive.azur... [azurewebsites.net]
This may be a special case, but working with SVG I can tell you that filtering and masking is considerably slower in Firefox than in Chrome.Oh, and that so called "hardware acceleration" is often enough a decelleration. Setting the number of maximum processes from 4 to 1 sometim
Re:Chrome performs ten times faster on this test (Score:4)
>"Just run the following performance test on Firefox and Chrome.
Whenever I look at benchmarks for the modern XXX vs. Firefox, they seem to be all over the map. In some specific benchmark tests, yes, XXX is X times faster than Firefox. But in others, Firefox is X times faster than XXX. What most people agree to is that with normal, general browsing, you can't really tell much of a difference in overall speed anymore.
By the way, I don't have Chrome, but I did compare Chromium to Firefox on that specific benchmark and had FAR worse results than you- 24 times slower! So yeah, they do need to work on whatever THAT is tickling! :)
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I run and prefer Firefox, but it was 34.6 times slower than Chrome on that benchmark on Kubuntu.
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Please mod that down. It was a rubbish comment. My apologies.
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I still use Chrome for certain purposes. I prefer using it for my online courses. It's nice to have a separate browser for them. Also, because of my heavy use of ad-blocking and privacy addons in Firefox, there's the occasional site that has issues and it's nice to have Chrome as a backup.
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>"Yeah? How do you verify that?"
Well, I can't. There are a lot of things we can't verify..... like, how much spyware, backdoors, and trackingware is inside those Chrome binaries? Inside MS-Windows? Inside MacOS? But we *KNOW* that Google tracks everyone to hell and back on google.com.
So if there is any tracking with Startpage (against what they claim) then at least it is not from Google.
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>"Again, how do you know that? Who ever said you have to go to google.com to be tracked by google?"
Unless Startpage is colluding with Google, how exactly is Google going to know everything you are searching for when the requests are coming from a third party that is acting as a proxy/filter?
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If we stopped using stuff from every company or business who ever did something controversial, there would be nothing left for us to use or buy! What Mozilla did back then, was clearly and absolutely wrong. But Google has done so many, many more wrongs. Don't even get me started on Microsoft...
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>"The only reason have Chrome install for those nasty web sites that have interactions that fail on Firefox. Those people don't follow standards!"
I can and do complain to operators of such web sites, especially when they are important sites. The last thing on earth we need is a return to the god-damn "this site supports only IE" or "best when viewed with IE X" days. Firefox is the primary (perhaps only) reason we we able to force a modicum of standards onto the world. We should NOT allow Google to tak
Even better (Score:4, Interesting)
Then, when Firefox Quantum rolled around, I saw myself forced to jump ship if I wanted to keep using the plugins and extensions I had come to rely on, including some extensions which I had written myself, but could not be ported to WebExtensions due to missing APIs.
That's when I decided to switch to Pale Moon, which is essentially a Firefox fork, but with significant differences, far less cruft and a truly free and open source model, without commercial involvement, like with Mozilla.
The Basilisk browser is the current preview of the next iteration of Pale Moon, and it will add some new features to Pale Moon, but retain the lean, low memory profile nature. I could honestly not be happier and would recommend that others switch to Pale Moon, Basilisk, or WaterFox (another Firefox fork).
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Yeah I have also decided to jump ship now that Mozilla has basically dropped the customization that made Firefox Firefox. If they had dumped the XUL system for being too insecure and had replaced it with something more advanced and powerful I would have been cool with it. Well except for yet again proving to extension developers how little their work is valued by making all of their hard work obsolete. The problem is they replaced the old system with Chrome's weaker system that doesn't let extension develop
new moon? (Score:2)
Is anyone looking at forking quantum. Unlock origin and umatrix are the only extensions I use, and I like the performable and security benefits of quantum (and aesthetically I like that it uses rust).
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freakin' anonymity protocol that Firefox (and its various forks) will almost certainly never have.
Firefox will have it. Mozilla's project Fusion [mozilla.org] is working to integrate Tor into Firefox. The goal is to make Tor Browser (which is a Firefox fork) obsolete [torproject.org] by including Tor in Firefox by default.
Two browsers? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are more than just two browsers on the market... I've been a quite satisfied Opera user for years now. Ad-block without an extension. VPN without an extension. The fact the majority of the web is now designed for Webkit/Blink first, and Mozilla's rendering engine is just an afterthought. Opera is pretty much the best of all worlds.
Re:Two browsers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Vivaldi?
Firefox is kind of bloated and their leadership is succumbing to the "we must be politically active" bullshit.
Brave is still a work in progress, I refuse to use browsers that send tracking information directly to the big data companies so edge and chrome are out. I didn't realize that opera had been sold to the chinese so that can be assumed to be spyware.
The picken's are getting slim. Any others out there?
Re:Two browsers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad Mozilla is politically active. They have done a lot to improve the internet, especially regarding privacy and security. With the W3C the way it is and Google/Microsoft having corporate interests we need someone like Mozilla to advocate for our interests.
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Marginal privacy benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
Google can track you just fine even if you are not using Chrome.
Just by knowing the four or five web sites you visit most is enough to ID you.
I use Chrome for Discord and that's it (Score:2)
I use the Chromium browser for Discordapp.com chat and Firefox for pretty much everything else. When you try to change your avatar or upload emoji in Firefox, Discord does not respond to a click on the upload button. (Nothing appears in the error console either.) This has been the case for roughly a year, since late May of 2017. Uploading avatars and emoji works in Chromium the same way as it works in the (Chromium-based) native app.
Or are the compelling features of Firefox themselves a reason to leave Disc
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My report: "This feature is broken in Firefox."
Reply: "Does it work in the latest version of Chrome?"
My reply: "Yes, it works in Chrome."
Reply: "Then use Chrome. RESOLVED WONTFIX"
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References: Twitter [twitter.com], Twitter [twitter.com], Trello [trello.com], Reddit [reddit.com], Discord Feedback [discordapp.com]
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My report: "This feature is broken in Firefox."
Reply: "Does it work in the latest version of Chrome?"
My reply: "Yes, it works in Chrome."
Reply: "Then use Chrome. RESOLVED WONTFIX"
I have encountered this problem with several websites.
ME: "Hey, your website is broken."
WEBSITE: "What browser are you using?"
ME: "Firefox"
WEBSITE: "Use Chrome."
ME: "Why won't you just fix your website?"
WEBSITE: "Use Chrome"
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MDN is a wiki (Score:2)
Neither bug is documented in MDN.
[...]
References: [Bugzilla links]
MDN is a wiki using GitHub authentication [mozilla.org]. If you have a GitHub account, and you know how to phrase something in a tone that's more descriptive than complaining, and you have time, you can correct this.
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Does Discord have any sort of relationship with Google? Because that sounds awfully like the kind of shit Microsoft was pulling back in the day.
The Discord desktop application uses Electron (Score:2)
Why not just use the Discord app?
The Discord, Skype, and Slack desktop applications use Electron. This means each is literally a copy of Chromium hardcoded to view one website. Installing both Chromium and the Discord, Skype, and Slack desktop applications would just waste disk space, and running both Chromium and the Discord, Skype, and Slack desktop applications at the same time would just waste RAM.
The question is... (Score:2, Informative)
The question is, what the fuck were you doing on Chrome in the first place?? Run Firefox+NoScript+Adblock/Ublock Origin and call it a day.
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What is better about running Firefox with those plugins compared to running Chrome with those plugins?
Chrome has better security and performance. Firefox has a few built in privacy features that Chrome needs add-ons for. There isn't much in it really, mostly just which UI you prefer.
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I use that setup and 99% of the websites I go to work.
What ad-driven crap are you doing on the internet?
Name one site that takes more than an extra click or two to activate videos, using that set up.
Re: The question is... (Score:2)
Sounds like a feature to me.
Re: The question is... (Score:2)
My stance is that if noscript breaks a site, it is up to me to decide if I want to let that page run scripts. Almost always I just navigate away or close the tab.
Sorry, web 'coders.' Write code for a real platform.
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A nice workaround - and Chrome has an equivalent - is to click into document mode before the ass-hat adblock detected pops up. It usually works and hey ma, no ads!
Does this make me weird? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no interest in the politics of which web browser to use. I use Safari, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox all the same time.
Safari for business browsing and other stuff. It is integrated best with MacOS naturally.
Edge when I have to do Windows stuff (in a VM) and it turns out to be a pretty good PDF viewer and some other interesting features.
Firefox when I am doing personal surfing and media playing. That way I keep my personal browser history separate from my business browser history. If I decide to wipe my personal browser history then I can do it and I don't lose the business history.
Chrome is best for JS debugging. It is really nice to be able to set breakpoints, single step, and inspect runtime state from inside the WebStorm IDE. Both Typescript and Javascript.
On top of that when I develop a web page or web app I use all of them to see how it looks in each and whether all the JS stuff works the same. That's the least I can do for my work, right?
I don't time to dither in browser wars.
I'll switch back as soon as... (Score:3)
I'll switch back as soon as Firefox starts supporting ALSA again. I could put up with all the other shit, even moving to new plug in architecture, that the fuckwit brogrammers at Mozilla did, but abandoning support for Linux's only universal sound architecture was simply beyond cretinous and well into the realm of counter-productive hipster stupidity. I suppose it was cool and ironic but I'm neither of those, and I prefer simple ALSA over ALSA+ so at that point it was goodbye to Firefox after almost 15 years of using it on Windows, Linux and lately Android, and hello to Chrome and Chromium.
I try occasionally. (Score:2)
I have 32GB of RAM in my workstation. I did that because I was hitting the ceiling hard with anything less. When I use Firefox, even the 64 bit version, it starts breaking down as it reaches the 32bit memory barriers (2GB process image / 4GB address space) with larger numbers of open tabs. It grinds to a halt and often crashes. This is a serious pain for me becau
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Vivaldi browser (Score:2)
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The reality is.. (Score:2)
... the individual cannot be responsible for their privacy when companies with bottomless wells of cash and Internet service providers who are also cable companies are sharing data and have developed advanced software to identify individuals. The same way TOR is being blocked by services like cloudfare and people are forced to do captcha's. If you want to use TOR to browse a popular website or be anonymous good luck with that.
Your IP address and your email can be correlated using flaws in html, java and o
I used Firefox for 20 years (Score:2)
Well, Netscape first, then Mozilla Firefox. Switched to Chrome last year, when Firefox ditched the fully featured addon API.
As all of the addons I needed are either no longer available for Firefox or are limited in the same way Chrome addons are, I see no reason to go back.
Support is a two way street. I supported Firefox as long as they supported my needs. They no longer do, and so it's good bye. No compelling reason to come back as of now.
Switched away from FF due to their politics (Score:5, Insightful)
And I’ll be staying away. Philosophically, I’m more closely aligned with the Mozilla folks than with people like Eich - but Mozilla demonstrated that bullying and intolerance exist on both sides of the political spectrum, and I’m not going to overlook it just because their on “my” side.
So, for me, the only viable choice is Safari. I have to keep Chrome and Firefox around for testing, but they’re limited to that role.
FF leaks memory like a sieve.. (Score:2)
Now that Firefox runs in multiple processes, it sucks up virtually all of the memory on the laptop. I oftentimes have to kill Firefox in order to run other apps on the laptop.
It didn't seem quite so bad when it was just one process - then it at least was limited to 2G.
Netscape (Score:2)
I was already on Firefox when it was still called Netscape. And I stayed on it all the time for exactly the reason the author uses. Well, and because IE was a piece of utter, utter crap in the 1990s and 2000s of course.
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Observing memory use I see no reason what so ever to ditch FF in favour of Chrome.
There are a few sites that work better in Chromium, can't really put my finger on the why.
But I do know certain sites can fill up memory till it's necessary to stop and restart FF.
It is Java Script causing this memory leak and using the JS switch plug in stops the problem.
Refactor (Score:2)
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I'm a heavy FF user and it crashes maybe once per year, that's with configuration inherited since the advent of (K)ubuntu.
I'm not a single issue user. (Score:2)
All browsers are free yet they provide incredible functionality and value. I'm OK with the price of providing data to whomever has made the browser that I'm using. As long as they don't stifle my ability to anonymize myself or my ability to block any and all ads that I choose. So as long as this is true I'll select the browser that best suits my needs.
Dont let an ad company (Score:2)
Dont let an ad company near your webcam, microphone, data.
Honest question: is it a big deal? (Score:2)
I use firefox anyway.
I have no axe to grind. I don't care what browser anybody uses.
All google wants to do is send you targetted ads, instead of random ads. You are going to see ads anyway.
Google is not prying into your private life. Google has billions of users, and uses algorithms to target ads. It is unlikely that anybody at google would recognize your name, or know anything about you.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is a big deal. If so, maybe somebody could explain why?
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Remember Google lives of selling this data, one small slip-up and it is sold to the wrong.
Already using both (Score:2)
So....about 3 years ago I was annoyed that google services were so linked: once you connect to one (Gmail), you get connected to all (Youtube, Search etc.). Search was my biggest problem.
So I use Chrome for Gmail and Youtube (well, they already have my info) and do the rest of my browsing in Firefox (logged-out Google Search and all others).
For a lower-memory option (like a 4GB VM), I found I could open a Firefox private window and login to GMail+Youtube there (with saved passwords), leaving the main window
Vivaldi (Score:2)
False sense of security (Score:2)
I use Chrome myself, for all my browsing. I'm fully aware the thing is spying on my browsing habits every day, all day.
But then, pretty much every website is doing this regardless of my browser choice. It's not difficult to build a 'profile' of what any particular given user looks like (to a computer.) The point being, I could use something like Pale Moon, Firefox, or any other non-Chrome browser, but does that increase my privacy and security? Probably not.
By electing to use the most nosy browser there
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you breathe you're already a victim of surveillance
FTFY
FTFY
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Non-profit is not the same as charity. It costs a LOT of money to keep Mozilla going.
No, it costs a lot of money to employ hundreds of people who do nothing of value, sitting in extremely expensive San Francisco office space.
Re:If Mozilla were a non-profit... (Score:5, Insightful)
While absolutely non-profits can and are actively abused in different ways, they are generally orders of magnitude better than the abuse from most full corporations (as I type this from a Google Chrome window...). Mozilla has faults for sure, but they are not baked in quite like Google's faults. As they mentioned, Google is an ad company and always has been. Sure, they have created a bunch of cool stuff and back in the early days they were probably just the legit nerdy people wanting to build awesome things for people to use while using the ad dollars to fund their passion. Problem is somewhere along the lines that was lost (probably around that billion dollar net worth mark...) and they realized they could use these cool things they built to create a greater ad platform that made lots of money and that not just some companies would use, but all companies would use. This honestly became even more evident when they reorganized into Alphabet as the parent company and Google being made a sub-entity with an advertisement focus (notice how the browser, Gmail, Android, etc. were not split off into their own companies or non-profit foundations? Yea, there is a reason for that...).
I've been toying with the idea of getting off the Google teet at least a bit myself simply because they have become significantly less trust-worthy over the past 5 years, arguably decade. Problem I am running into is the alternatives are not too stellar and the migration process is PAINFUL. I migrated to Gmail from Yahoo since Yahoo made clear they hired a bunch of 10 year olds to manage their security and that was rough as hell. I would honestly like to switch to Proton Mail or a self hosted solution now, but I dread going through all of that again.
Then phone-wise, as much as I loathe Apple, I have to give them credit that they are actually taking privacy practices pretty seriously. Playing into the greater point though, guess why? Apple is a hardware business and has been since forever. They can afford to do it, because that was never their business model, unlike Google who was doing advertising from the start (which relies heavily on knowing your demographics). The problem is that no one else provides a flexible phone OS like Android and I really don't want to start installing custom ROMs...
Now browser might be something I could do reasonably without too much pain. We have real competition in the browser space (though all of them have their issues) and I genuinely feel like Mozilla is much better than Google at this point (note BETTER not necessarily good...).
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That type of change is what made me move away from Firefox as well. Seemingly every other version they move all the buttons around. And I don't want to hear the crap about "Go into config;???" or whatever to configure it the way you want. Let the people who want the damn thing to change every week go into the config settings and they do the change. Don't put the burden on me, I never asked for it.
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Kids need to learn about the realities of life and that love can mend what hate is trying to break.
Closing the curtains on the world is totally unfair to your kids.
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I'm having a hard time parsing exactly what you want here. You're angry at Mozilla not doing more to the guy.
Ballot initiatives are legal, that's democracy at work. Sometimes people promote ideas that you won't like. Sometimes you promote ideas that *they* won't like. We can't just "sue" people for promoting different ideas through the ballot initiative system, *even if* they're ballot initiatives which promote things which are illegal. e.g.: that's the entire point of ballot initiatives, to change the laws
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* I'll go a step further and say that angrily demanding that people who merely advocate for changes through legal avenues should be put in prison is getting dangerously totalitarian in outlook, no matter how "morally right" your cause is. Demanding prison for people who don't respect the *idea* of gay rights is fundamentally no different to a theocracy that imprisons people for being heretics. ... We become the thing we most hate.