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'Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox - and You Should Too' (digitaltrends.com) 254

Posted by EditorDavid from the battling-browsers dept.
In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too."

Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years...

Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website...

What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet...

Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.
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'Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox - and You Should Too' More

'Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox - and You Should Too'

Comments Filter:

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:42PM (#59610606)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cervesaebraciator ( 2352888 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:54PM (#59610634)
      I've even been working on extricating myself from Gmail, despite having being an early enough adopter to have my actual name as an address. Doing this takes a fair bit of effort: I have the account associated with countless other accounts. But that very fact emphasizes how badly it needs to be done.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        Register your own domain. Still use gmail service if you want, but know you could switch if required.

        • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Hylandr ( 813770 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @04:35AM (#59611586)

          This is just as bad.

          There's also the fact that Google has access to our email, smartphones. Knows our security questions, and logins to every institution we saved a password to.

          And the whole "Don't be evil" motto has been scrubbed from the building.

          The have all the information needed to stop society by steeling everyone's money, locking out their phones, and denying them access to email if it were done on the massive scale at once.

          Google is a Weapon.

    • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Interesting)

      by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:07PM (#59610662)

      >"After being an early adopter to Firefox in the beginning, I've been sucking on Chromes teat since release pretty much."

      In my case, I never left. I did go through the "rocky" period between the rise of Chrome and Mozilla's switch to their new Quantum engine in 2017, but I am glad I stayed. Firefox's on-par performance isn't anything new (like the summary implies).

      The very most important reason to switch or continue to use Firefox is to prevent Google from completely "taking over" the entire web; which they are absolutely doing. I do not want Google using its position to push their self-interest and agendas. Some sites are already starting to pop up that follow "Chrome" as a standard instead of actual web standards, and that is truly scary (welcome to Internet Explorer round two). We need to continue to have actual browser diversity and open standards compliance, and since all non-Firefox browsers are Chrome (being based on Chrome/Chromium, is the same thing as being Chrome), Mozilla/Firefox is currently the only thing that can fight back. Since there are really no downsides, I strongly recommend as many people switch to Firefox on all their systems as possible. It is up to tech/computer geeks like us to help spread the word.

      >"Google jumped the shark as an apps/services provider a long time ago, unless you're an advertiser.

      Just make sure that you also do not use Google as a search engine. That is the next step, if you haven't already. Use startpage.com, toki.com, or duckduckgo.com, or similar. And remember, you can also use Firefox on your Android phone. In that space, Chrome has some [unfair] advantage, since it is always pre-loaded and a better optimized; but privacy is more important.

      • Meanwhile Mozilla's decided that they're going to go full google and create a blacklist they use to prevent users from using or even manually installing browser extensions they don't like for arbitrary reasons.

        Welcome to Chrome 2.0. You will see what mozilla wants you to see, you will install what they want you to install, you will obey.

    • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:07PM (#59610666) Homepage Journal

      I'm stuck with Chrome because Firefox in Android is crap. A lot of sites don't render well but are fine in Chrome, and Mozilla don't seem interested in fixing it. In fact they took away some of the features that made it usable, like a working minimum font size.

      Keeping everything synced between too browsers is a chore.

      • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:4, Interesting)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:19PM (#59610708)

        >"I'm stuck with Chrome because Firefox in Android is crap."

        You might be sorta stuck in Android (since Chrome does win in that space) but certainly not on desktop.

        >"A lot of sites don't render well but are fine in Chrome.

        I use Firefox on all my Android devices and don't have quite as much issue as you do.

        >"In fact they took away some of the features that made it usable, like a working minimum font size."

        There is an addon that gives much more flexibility in that regard. It is called "Fixed Zoom", check it out!

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I tried fixed zoom, no good. A good test case is Slashdot's desktop homepage. The mobile version sucks so I use desktop on mobile. Fine in Chrome, unusable in Firefox.

          Sync is the big issue with using two different browsers.

      • Firefox on android is the only good browser with ad blockers. It is what makes youtube usable on mobile.

        • >"Firefox on android is the only good browser with ad blockers. It is what makes youtube usable on mobile."

          Agreed. I will not and cannot use the web otherwise.

      • I haven't had this problem with Firefox on Android. On the contrary, it works better than chrome because of ad blocking. The only thing missing is AMP, but that's a mixed bag.

      • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sremick ( 91371 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @03:09AM (#59611468)

        I'm stuck with Chrome because Firefox in Android is crap.

        Not sure what issue you're having, but like others who have responded to you here, I've been using Firefox as my default browser on Android for a very long time now, without issue.

        A lot of sites don't render well but are fine in Chrome, and Mozilla don't seem interested in fixing it.

        A site that's not following web standards and it using Chrome-proprietary code is the fault of the website, not Firefox, and it's not Firef'ox's job to support Chrome's broken proprietary markup any more than it was their job to supports IE's. You're blaming the wrong side.

    • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Informative)

      by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:43PM (#59610764) Journal

      I used Chrome for a few weeks and was stunned by how much and how often it phoned home. Like every fucking minute or so.

      Firefox has grown bloated and gotten sorta stupid, but I still refer it to almost anything else.

      • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Informative)

        by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @12:15AM (#59611176) Homepage Journal

        I was shocked at the amount of activity from Chrome on Android when you don't even use it. Even if you never open Chrome, it uses CPU, storage, and network bandwidth all the time. You have to disable it to completely stop it. You can't uninstall it on a regular Android phone or a Samsung phone. Google doesn't like you using Samsung Internet (uses Blink rendering, but has built-in tracker blocking features, support for AdBlock Plus, etc.) so they actively punish Samsung Internet users by serving up far worse ReCAPTCHA puzzles. If you use Samsung Internet, you get several "click until there are none left" style ones in a row, and it loads the images really slowly.

        I've never installed Chrome on my computers. I keep a copy of Opera installed to test things against Blink/V8, and also because a couple of sites work better with it. There's web-based video call thing I use that doesn't work properly with Firefox.

      • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @12:26AM (#59611190)

        When Chrome was first released, I installed in on a test system. I was shocked to see that on every cold boot (after rebooting Windows), Chrome would read 20GB and write 4GB at startup from the HD, just sitting at idle on a blank page. I don't know what files it was sifting through or why, but I knew whatever the hell it was doing wasn't in my best interest. That was my first and last test of Chrome and I haven't touched it since.

      • Use Iron. Full Chrome minus all the Google telemetry parts, so it fucking flies. SRWare Iron Browser.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Firefox has it's own series of issues, I'd suggest Waterfox [waterfox.net] as an alternative, especially since it supports legacy add-ons, especially the useful stuff like greasemonkey and NPAPI support.

      • Re:Switched 6 months ago (Score:5, Informative)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @10:23PM (#59610980)

        >"Firefox has it's own series of issues"

        All browsers have issues. No argument there :)

        >"I'd suggest Waterfox [waterfox.net] as an alternative

        I wouldn't. Because it isn't Quantum, so it is slow. And since it is isn't mainline with the Firefox engine, it will not be anywhere near as secure anymore. And will become more and more insecure over time.

        There is almost no good reason to use a browser (like Waterfox) based on the old Firefox, anymore. Most of the annoyances of the UI can now be tweaked, and for probably 98% of people, they will find the addon (or similar one) they need for Quantum Firefox.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Fast enough is fast enough and the advantage https://www.waterfox.net/ [waterfox.net] is simply better to use. Tab bar can be positioned without coding. search menu works like you would expect it to, nice drop down list of your favourite search engines.

          Being able to have it work the way you want, choose the layout ie for me, Menu and core bookmarks at the top and title bar, address and search bars in the middle row and tabs as the bottom row, work really well. Three rows of detail and everything I want to do covered. I u

          • >"Being able to have it work the way you want, choose the layout ie for me, Menu and core bookmarks at the top and title bar, address and search bars in the middle row and tabs as the bottom row, work really well. "

            That is exactly how my Quantum Firefox (74) is configured. Yes, it does take installing a custom "userChrome.css" https://github.com/Aris-t2/Cus... [github.com] but it does work, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too.

            Why Mozilla has been so INCREDIBLY hostile about allowing users to have tabs on botto

            • >That is exactly how my Quantum Firefox (74)

              Sorry, typo. That is 72, not 74 (which doesn't exist yet).

        • Most of the annoyances of the UI can now be tweaked, and for probably 98% of people, they will find the addon (or similar one) they need for Quantum Firefox.

          Ctrl+Q is bound to Quit in Firefox for Linux, and it's adjacent to Ctrl+W (close tab) and Ctrl+Tab (switch to next tab). Ctrl+Shift+Q is bound to Quit in Firefox for Windows, and it's adjacent to Ctrl+Shift+Tab (switch to previous tab). Accidentally pressing the Quit shortcut could cause loss of unsubmitted form contents in other tabs, and Restore Previous Session consistently fails to restore text in comment forms on Slashdot.

          I used to use Keybinder [github.com] to unmap Ctrl+Q. I haven't seen a replacement for Keybind

          • >" I haven't seen a replacement for Keybinder, and this is because Bug 1325692 "Explicit support for overriding built-in keyboard shortcuts by WebExtensions" has languished unfixed for over three years."

            I am not going to defend Mozilla for their not allowing remapping of the function (which seems like a stupid limitation), nor for not fixing that bug. But I will point out (for other readers) that the bug only affects Linux. The addons will work for MacOS and MS-Windows (example: https://addons.mozilla. [mozilla.org]

        • Pretty sure Waterfox Current runs Quantum. Waterfox Classic is still the old pre-Quantum browser. Which isn't a bad thing, since it was nice and fast compared to pre-Quantum Firefox. Don't underestimate its speed. It's definitely faster than Edge. Consider Octane 2.0, Waterfox Classic vs. Edge:

          Waterfox Classic: 46164
          Edge: 42644

          Haven't got Firefox installed so I can't compare there.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Quantum is "fast because it removes powerful add-on API".

          To use the ever so popular car analogies, old API is the typical sedan. Not the fastest thing, but really comfortable. Quantum is sedan where everything that is not absolutely critical to vehicle being drivable from point A to point B is removed to make it faster. Sure, you just lost a good third of the vehicle weight, which means it's a lot faster as it doesn't have to lug the body, windows, entertainment system and seats.

          But sitting on the frames wi

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Having used Firefox since version 1.0 I've never understood why everyone is so in love with Chrome. But this article is just stupid.

      Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way.

      Mozilla had been paid enormous amount of money by Google. Somewhere around $300 Million a year -- around $2 Billion over the past decade, representing 95% of Mozilla's revenue. Mozilla is extremely dependent on Google.

      On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running.

      LOL. Software and the Internet in general has become horribly bloated. But if opening a few tabs stresses your computer, it means your computer is shit, not

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by laffer1 ( 701823 )

        For a period of time, chrome was faster and lighter weight. It also had less memory leaks. Granted, most leaks were due to third party add-ons in firefox and mozilla killed half of them with the rust downgrade.

        I switched because of the following:
        * chormecast support is only in chrome.
        * browser sync between platforms. Google had a better implementation early on. Firefox for iOS sucked in the first attempt. The android version is OK but has a few issues on some sites.
        * Until version 28, there were decent p

        • Chromecast (and all other things of its ilk and all so called Plug'n'Play network technologies) are not designed to be capable of working in secure environments.

          I have a secure environment, so therefore none of these things work (and are all disabled anyway as the nightmare hunks of ill-designed crap they are).

          There is therefore no reason to used Chrome or any other Google product. They are all security nightmares, so I do not use them. I do have an Android phone, but that is only for "phoning".

      • > Having used Firefox since version 1.0 I've never understood why everyone is so in love with Chrome. But this article is just stupid.

        I also used FF from v1.0 until about v4 and then switched to Chrome. Chrome offered numerous advantages:

        * Chrome *didn't* have that stupid memory leak bug that FF devs refused to acknowledge FOR YEARS,
        * Each tab ran in its own process. If a tab crashed it didn't take down EVERY tab,
        * Chrome was faster
        * Chrome's "Task Manager" (Shift-ESC) makes it trivial to tell which pr

  • reason, like 6 months ago, and never look back.

    Now, I which to have another email, because gmail suck big time.

    • Re:I switch for almost the same (Score:5, Informative)

      by I am not a Bicycle ( 6231610 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:09PM (#59610672)

      I can think of two at the moment: tutanota.com (based in Germany) and protonmail.com (based in Switzerland). The Wikipedia list article on webmail providers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers) also provides some interesting side-by-side feature comparison, even if it's not fully updated (e.g. some boxes have the question mark symbol in them).

      You have more options if your requirement is simply to send messages in one form or another, rather than rely on a well-defined service platform. Then you can try the many other federated communication systems that fall under the weird name "Fediverse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse). Here you can find decentralized alternatives to the popular social media platforms, including microblogging, image and even video sharing, and instant messaging.

    • There is also https://posteo.de/en [posteo.de]

      - It uses carddav and caldav, working out of the box with iOS or with additional software on Android
      - You could set up the account and pay anonymously (money in envelope)
      - You could encrypt all the mails contacts and calenders with your password
      - You could encrypt all unencrypted incoming emails with your public pgp key

      And in 2018 there were 285000 accounts but only 2 instances where they delivered data to authorities https://posteo.de/en/site/tran... [posteo.de]

      Or https://mailbox.org/ [mailbox.org]

  • Deliberately Chrome-dependent websites (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:47PM (#59610616) Homepage Journal

    The biggest threat to Firefox that I can see is website operators deliberately making their websites Chrome-dependent.

    - Getting your stream key on Twitch depends on Authy, which is available as a Chrome extension in Chrome Web Store but not as a Firefox extension in AMO.
    - Skype for Web blocks all browsers other than Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
    - Most of Discord worked in Firefox, but some video-related features of Discord are available only in Chrome and in the desktop app (which amounts to a separate installation of Chromium hardcoded to view discordapp.com).

    • In the case of Skype it is because they have DRM intended to block third party clients. It is too bad, but there are also SIP providers available.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Before the sunset of Skype for Linux classic in favor of the current Electron monstrosity and the sunset of Firefox support in Skype for Web, I had used Skype for text chat more than voice calls. Do SIP providers help with that?

        • No, but consider XMPP.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            My research has concluded that my contacts would need to install yet another app in order to use XMPP. What other information would I need to gather in order to determine whether a reasonable person would be willing to install an app just to communicate with one person?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Slimjet is available as an alternative that works with chrome extensions and I expect there are more forks.

      If Firefox's user base drops too low then we'll end up with more websites not supporting it. Firefox also has several forks, Waterfox is my Firefox now.

      I never had a problem with Firefox not being fast enough, shrugs.

    • - Getting your stream key on Twitch depends on Authy, which is available as a Chrome extension in Chrome Web Store but not as a Firefox extension in AMO.

      Authy is an independent third party 2FA program, a (better) substitute for Google Authenticator. You don't need to use the Chrome extension version. You can download standalone versions [authy.com] for Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        You don't need to use the Chrome extension version.

        A user of desktop Linux does, for the following reason:

        You can download standalone versions [of Authy] for Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows.

        Last time I tried Authy for Windows in Wine in Xubuntu 18.04 LTS (64-bit), it failed to install.

  • Never went Chrome, can't switch :D (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asackett ( 161377 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:47PM (#59610618) Homepage

    I never jumped on the Googod bandwagon because it's pretty obvious where their loyalties lie. All it takes to understand any Western businessman is to know where his money comes from -- Googod does not want us to be anonymous and private in the public space of the internet. So fuck 'em.

    • Or just use SRWare Iron, which is Chrome but with no telemetry.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      I also never switched to Chrome. My current mozilla profile dates back to 2001 and somewhere in the Mozilla 0.9 series and even before I lost a lot of data in a disk failure I had been using Mozilla betas and Netscape before that.

      Even my phone (Nokia N900) is running a Mozilla based browser.

      • :D Same boat! Whether or not ~/.mozilla/ came into being when I switched from FreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux way back in '95, I dunno, but as long as it's been there, it's followed me from box to box. Every decade or so I blow away the dot-somethings that belong to dead titles just so they don't clutter my home directory listing. My .ximian and .staroffice directories are backed up, though, just in case I time travel without my hardware.

  • I noticed that Chrome now runs poorly on my 2013 era Macbook Pro ever since I "upgraded" it to Mac OS X 10.15. That's probably not Google's fault, though, because it runs much faster on my Windows 10 devices. I've been pretty loyal to Chrome because of how it keeps my bookmarks and history synched over my various devices, but Firefox can now do this as well.

  • I use Firefox (Score:3)

    by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:51PM (#59610628)

    I use Firefox, but the one thing I really get frustrated with is the crappy printing capabilities. Most websites I frequent are just not rendered properly. Most commonly I will print and the preview just shows the first page. I know that other browsers have problems when it comes to printing, but my experience has been that Firefox is worse than Chrome and Edge in this regard.

    • Re:I use Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

      by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:16PM (#59610698)

      >"I know that other browsers have problems when it comes to printing,"

      True that. The "web" wasn't really ever designed with printing in mind. Most of the time the regular print preview/print function works fine, but sometimes it isn't quite what you want. Fortunately, Firefox has that covered with a new feature (of which you might not be aware) that allows you to capture the entire site as a "screenshot"

      https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]

      Once you activate it through the "..." option, you can select "save full page", which is very nifty (and something you can't do with any OS-based screenshot tool) because it will render the ENTIRE PAGE (not just what you see on the screen) as a screenshot. The only thing missing is a subsequent print operation, but the image can be saved and printed elsewhere, it even has a "copy to buffer" option so you can just paste it elsewhere. This feature comes in handy if your regular print preview of a site just doesn't cut it.

    • Not a solution. But rather than print I use Firefox's built-in screenshot feature. This gets me an extra-long web page with all or almost all the formatting intact. What you see on the browser is what gets screenshot. The major drawback, again, is the extra long PNG image. Welcome to the new age of the scroll! (Some inkjet printers might be able to print the page if you can find paper that long. Line or dot matrix printers have always had the option of printing on continuous form paper.)

    • It is usually because they do weird progressive rendering, and Firefox is optimized more towards printing standards-based sites well. It is the difference between seeing the page as structured data, or as an image. Firefox does well with structured data on a small printer. Chrome and Edge do terrible on a small printer, but they do well on a letter size page with graphics. So different people get a wide variety of differing results depending on what type of sites they're printing.

      If a site is accessible the

  • Never used Chrome or derivatives (Score:3)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:53PM (#59610632)
    Chrome is made by Privacy Rapists 2.0 [slashdot.org]: Google/Alphabet.

  • Why I finally stopped telling people how to browse (Score:5, Funny)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:05PM (#59610658)
    ... And you should too.

  • Switch? No thanks, I use multiple browsers. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:12PM (#59610678)

    Browser compartmentalization works nicely.

    I run one totally locked down for communication/shopping, another for shitposting and surfing, another for built-in VPN to read more from paywalled sites than otherwise permitted, and Tor for Tor-ish things.

    Single browser use is a stupid meme.

    • Both browsers support distinct profiles though.

      There is plenty of reason to separate your banking from your trolling. There's no reason not to chose both Firefox or both Chrome with different profiles rather than making your life far more complicated by also assigning the browsing "persona" to a piece of code rather than a profile.

      What happens when you want to have more personas than there are viable browsers? What happens when a particular webpage that you want to view in one persona works better in anothe

      • I currently run three different browsers (SRWare Iron for most things, Chrome for paypal VPN shit and Netflix as they use weird DRM, and Firefox for some batch-scrape jobs that Chrome/Iron can't handle because their socket limits are low and a pain in the ass to correct.)

  • I've always run Firefox on the desktop. About 6 months ago, I switched to Firefox on my Android mobile devices as well. Firefox had pretty much come up to parity with Chrome in speed, but the clincher was the ability to use privacy extensions like Ghostery in my mobile browsers. Bye, Chrome!

  • Only one option for real privacy (Score:3)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:22PM (#59610714) Journal
    Lynx [browser.org].

  • But, but, but... It wasn't really me, etc. (Score:4, Informative)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:23PM (#59610722) Homepage Journal

    I'm not criticizing EditorDavid for the story, though he cites me and thereby gives me more credit than I deserve. He adopted a fairly pure technical perspective, whereas my version was (predictably) slanted in the direction of my sig, which is more philosophical than technical.

    On the one hand, because of my philosophic bent I now feel like blowing the topic off, but on the other hand, I feel like I should show why EditorDavid took the more technical approach. Give him credit for his superior editorial discretion? And the strongest evidence would seem to be my original submission. Here's what I actually submitted under the title "How bad are browser wars? with this link https://www.digitaltrends.com/... [digitaltrends.com] (which at least gives yet another angle on the topic). Now speaking for myself:

    Not sure what's the best way to approach this topic. I'm not really interested in why Firefox is or is not better than Chrome. I "know" Edge is gawdawful, but how much of that is the taint of "bad old" MIcrosoft? Does it matter if Opera clings in there? I'm not bent out of shape because one of my phones features the maker's own browser that works well enough most of the time. Can I think the Apple way without using Safari on my Mac? And why does Firefox have different menus on Android, Linux, and Windows? What about accessible audio browsers for the blind? Does the iPhone even have a browser? Just joking about the iPhone, but it's a rich vein. Much ado about little?

    My primary interest is in meaningful choice and how it relates to freedom. I don't think we need monolithic and huge browsers, but a thousand blooming flowers would be a blooming nuisance, so I think the standards are the key and I don't like any browser's claim to be "the standard browser", de facto or otherwise.

    In solution terms, I wish they'd focus on recovering their costs, not maximizing their profits. I think that pushes me to Firefox or Opera, since I don't think they have profits linked to any of the giant corporate cancers. I just want reliable and "fast enough" browsers that don't crash themselves or the entire computer. (These days I can't even tell if the crashes belong to the browser, flaws in the hardware, the OS, or maybe the maker's bad design decisions.)

    Oh my gawd. I just remembered the JavaScript problem...

  • Ever since Apple crippled extensions in the latest versions of Safari (and actually demands add-on developers to pay them for the privilege), Safari has been dead to me, so I'm all in on Firefox as my main browser.

  • You can check out any time you like... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Howitzer86 ( 964585 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:33PM (#59610738)

    The convenience of having my bookmarks, browsing and search history follow me around wasn't a big enough advantage compared to the inconvenience of having my bookmarks, browsing and search history follow me around. I tried to keep it logged out at work, and an update or something logged me back in and synced my bookmarks anyway. Search suggestions at work mirrored those at home, down to even some the most recent searches, even though it was logged out.

    I now use Firefox instead of Chrome, Duck Duck Go instead of Google, iPhone instead of Android, and Outlook instead of Gmail. It's worked out so far, but I haven't really checked out completely thanks YouTube. Meanwhile, Firefox really wants me to create an account...

  • Some things are more important than performance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bradmont ( 513167 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @08:35PM (#59610740) Homepage

    I've been using Firefox since it became Firefox (and used the Mozilla browser for years before that). It seems like the main draw to chrome for technically minded people has been better performance (for less technical people it seems to be some combination of bandwagonism, the ads for it on the google search page, and "I use it because the technical people use it!). But much more important than performance is respect for the user. Which is the entire reason I've used firefox all these years.

    Performance is nice, and it has gone back and forth between the two over the years. But the thing is, I've never really noticed it. Firefox has always been fast enough. But the tech world seems to have a strange performance for performance sake bent; there is such a thing as fast enough -- tech is not an end in itself. It is a means to be used. But we let it use us by buying into its myth that we must always have the best, fastest, and most recent. The time we waste running after that goal is probably a lot more than the miniscule performance gains will get us. And if we really were looking for speed, we'd all be using text and keyboard based UIs anyway...

      But either way, simple respect for the user outweighs performance every day, in my book.

    • But either way, simple respect for the user outweighs performance every day, in my book.

      I've never once regretted choosing software that respects the User.

      I've been using Firefox all along too, and I always wondered why are those people switching? Why do they change for no reason? Why fiddle? Why faddle?

      Now some of them are coming back. I'm not surprised.

      • Re:Some things are more important than performance (Score:4, Insightful)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @10:34PM (#59611002)

        >"I've been using Firefox all along too, and I always wondered why are those people switching? Why do they change for no reason? Why fiddle? Why faddle?"

        Because most people use Google for search, and they spammed the hell of out people, pestering them to switch to Chrome for YEARS. That's why. And at first, it really was faster. It took a few years for Mozilla to get back on par with Quantum Firefox. Most people don't understand freedom, privacy, standards-based, or other issues that are important to us. They act based only on speed and UI, and what "other" people are doing, and are easily swayed by repeated prompting. And now people don't realize they are using Chrome no matter what browser they choose, unless it is Firefox or Safari.

    • It's not just speed, it's also design. Firefox's UI always felt even clunkier than IE and looked like second-rate VisualBasic garbage. Chrome took the best part of Firefox (tabs) and vastly improved upon them, allowing them to be arranged on the fly and dragged between browser windows. At the same time, it minimized the amount of visual noise at the top and margins of the screen. It really offered a change in workflow for both researchers and people publishing to the web, allowing simple two-tab tasks to be

  • The writer is running their browser on a potato and needs to question whether to open a tab for resource reasons, the writer is worried about sensitive information being collected by cookies like they're going to break into his house or something, and what really clinched the deal is that it's not based on Chromium which the writer doesn't like because ... well apparently Google is big or something?

    Betteridge's law of headlines states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word n

  • I switched a year ago (Score:3)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @09:09PM (#59610818)
    In October '18 I had a hard drive crash. When I got my new machine I decided Google had enough info on me, and installed Firefox. Haven't looked back since.

    To be honest, I don't get the whole "I don't have to think twice about opening a new tab" bit. How many tabs do you usually have open? At most I might have 10-15 with no issues, typically it's only 2-3.

    In other words, I didn't switch due to performance issues. I switched due to privacy issues.

  • The only reason I fire it up is to see if is a browser related problem when people complain about the company site.

    Been using Firefox since it came out, but there were a few rough patches there for a while. It did suck when they used to change the interface every other damn day...to LOOK LIKE CHROME.

    Site is in asp.net. Amazingly, Firefox and Chrome perform almost identical on it. The browser that chokes on aps.net sites is Edge. Makes no sense.

  • I've been on the mozilla line since NCSA mosaic, and I continue to use it for it's cusomizeability. Of course, they insist on breaking all the customizations every few years, not to mention shuffling the UI around requiring me to re-learn simple tasks, but fortunately I'm a masochist and I like being kicked around a bit, which is pretty much a prerequisite for being a serious computer user.

    (Those Macintosh guys always seem to be in denial on this point, just because their dominatrix dresses up in a litt

    • I've been using Chrome since launch and have never had to re-learn a single thing about how to interface with the software. It's the simplicity, and not the speed, that appeals.

    • Of course, they insist on breaking all the customizations every few years { ... }

      Primates are always the biggest problem in engineering projects.

  • I never switched (Score:3)

    by Kagetsuki ( 1620613 ) on Saturday January 11, 2020 @10:19PM (#59610964)

    I've been using Firefox since pre-1 beta - and though I hate how the internal politics of the company have gone as of late I never switched to Chrome. Recently, since Brave now supports Chrome extensions, I've started installing that instead of Chromium for things I occasionally need to use like Hangouts.

    Aside from being a privacy/tracking nightmare Chrome has never appealed to me. Now that it's expanded into this weird application platform it also causes problems. I've seen it grab audio devices and not release them, turn on the webcam despite having no reason to even have access to it, and worst off it started implementing its own printing framework which ignores the OS printing facilities and scans the network for printers. This is all behaviour I absolutely do not want in a browser.

  • I hope Firefox stands up and stays better... but forgive me if I wait for more than five minutes, and see how things land in another six months.

  • ...don't use Apple notebooks.

  • If uBlock Origin does get crippled on Chrome, while still working on Firefox...

  • Switch if you can, Chrome doesn't offer much (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AxisOfPleasure ( 5902864 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:54AM (#59611436)

    Having used Chrome for around 2 years on Android, Mac, Linux and Windows many times a day I started to find it fat, bloated and useless at many work related tasks. Chrome was only ever interested in offering the latest technologies, much like Google kill of anything considered old or unfashionable. If you work in business there are a lot of old apps, some may be as older at 10-15 years, written at the infancy of internal company web apps, Chrome doesn't work well with these.

    Then there's Chrome being owned by the biggest personal data collection company on the planet, ever. If you're interested in keeping most of your personal life to yourself apart from what you choose to share, then dumping Chrome is a no-brainer.

    So 18 months ago I dropped Chrome completely switched to Firefox and I've very, very rarely used Chrome since. I find the bookmark syncing to be superb on FF and the fact that at work I can call up some old webapp written for IE7 and it still works perfectly, sure you need to pull down Flash player as I'm afraid when you work supporting very old apps there is still a lot of Flash used inside company systems ( Oracle Enterprise Manager still uses Flash!! ) and FF does a good job of allowing it to work selectively. Apps just work much the same across all platforms, sure mobile FF could be better in some place but I'd rather suffer some minor irritations than go back to Chrome and all the problems and data collection it has.

    I don't blame Google at all for what Chrome does, Google is not a charity, it's a business and business that has to make money. They need to a browser to make it easier to get that data that fuels their business, good luck to them. I'd just prefer to not help them for free and I'd like to have some choices in when I hand over the info to Google, so not using Chrome is a step in the right direction.

  • Navigator Communicator Firefox Vivaldi... (Score:3)

    by dbug78 ( 151961 ) on Sunday January 12, 2020 @05:08PM (#59613292)

    I went from Navigator to Communicator in the 90s, then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox around 2002/3.

    As my work started to demand more and more tabs be kept open around 2006, I became dependent on Tab Groups (first an addon, then integrated, then back to addon). Once the API change came and that functionality was lost, I struggled to find a suitable replacement, but eventually landed on Vivaldi. Vivaldi's tab stacks let me keep a similar process to what I had with Tab Groups on Firefox, and I was content with that for a couple years.

    Then I switched to Linux on the desktop at home last year, and found Vivaldi frequently crashed. Worse, it usually lost my session in the process, so the 30-50 tabs I had open were all gone including any work-in-progress.

    I went back to Firefox at this point and made use of multiple windows on virtual desktops to "group" my tabs. It wasn't as nice; and it's really irritating that the windows don't reopen on the same virtual desktops when closing and relaunching the browser (not a Firefox-specific problem); but it was good enough. Still, Firefox has long felt like it was just about to become a really polished browser in its next release, but never got there.

    Lately I've been using Brave which I rather like. The built-in Tor and Bittorrent clients are great. The privacy controls work well and are easy to use.

    That said, philosophically, Firefox is my home. I may yet end up back there down the road.

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