Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox (2018)

https://www.fastcompany.com/90174010/bye-chrome-why-im-switching-to-firefox-and-you-should-too

by commoner • 7 years ago

315 174 7 years ago

Not trying to snark, but this seems like pretty basic stuff - is there anything in the article that the average HN reader wouldn't have heard multiple times already?

forgotmypw32• 7 years ago

Content to advertising ratio very low with this article, I think people just voted it up for the feel-good value.

cookie_monsta4• 7 years ago

I guess that makes sense.

xxxtentachyon• 7 years ago

Nope, but this article isn't aimed at HN readers. It's aimed at lay people who don't necessarily understand what actions they're taking to implicitly undermine their own privacy or jeopardize the future of an open, standards-driven web. Katherine has written other, more innovative pieces around the same issues: https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-h...

cookie_monsta4• 7 years ago

Nope, but this article isn't aimed at HN readers. It's aimed at lay people who don't necessarily understand what actions they're taking...

So why is it here?

dammitfoo• 7 years ago

Not much. But the article can be shared with your non-technical friends and family members though. I guess that's why it has a lot of upvotes.

joemaller12• 7 years ago

Why not Brave? Honest question.

pmoriarty2• 7 years ago

Does Brave have anything like uMatrix and uBlock Origin?

That functionality is pretty essential to me, and I can get it on Firefox.

Other nice-to-haves on Firefox are: CanvasBlocker, NoScript, Cookie AutoDelete, Textern, and Stylus.

If Brave has some equivalent functionality, I'm interested.

Qutebrowser was another alternative which looked pretty promising, but last I checked its lead (only?) developer didn't have time to add the uMatrix/NoScript-like functionality he had intended. So it's a no-starter for me.

zamadatix• 7 years ago

Brave is just one of the Chromium clones so yes. Not on mobile though. Firefox on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though in that the current classic version is a bit outdated and is by far the worst browser for battery according to multiple test while the upcoming Firefox Preview rewrite fixes this and updates the interface but doesn't yet support extensions.

Some people disagree with Brave's operating model options around Ads.

I'd recommend checking out Vivaldi as well if you haven't. It's a Chromium clone with a proprietary interface (but written in web technologies so the code is auditable). Outside of the usual Chromium clone story of being exactly like Chrome without Google it has an extremely customizable user interface. The downside is it has a disproportionate number of UI bugs compared to other browsers but that seems to have gotten better since the 2.0 release train.

joemaller12• 7 years ago

Brave blocks ads, trackers and third-party cookies by default, and has private windows backed by Tor. The renderer is Chromium, FWIW.

I haven't done any exhaustive comparison of Brave against Chrome/Firefox with uBlock Origin, but the media sites I visit in Brave sure do like to remind me about the ad blocker.

The-Compiler• 7 years ago

qutebrowser lead developer here :)

Basic per-domain settings (which also allow blocking/allowing Javascript for a page, though not for different origins on that page) have been around since qutebrowser v1.2.0 (March 2018).

For more sophisticated uMatrix-like blocking, work is ongoing on an extension API, but there's jmatrix which already uses that API unofficially. I plan to get back to the extension API soon, but there are some more important things to take care of first - see the current roadmap for details. Also, I expect things to go much faster soon, as I finished my studies and I'll soon be able to start working part-time on qutebrowser funded by donations (via GitHub sponsors).

Some links:

v1.2.0 release: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... jmatrix: https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jmatrix roadmap: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... GitHub sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/The-Compiler/ related issues: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28

rpdillon• 7 years ago

I tend to not even consider browsers that aren't open source. If I did, I'd likely go with Vivaldi, but Firefox is great, so I use that.

nullspace2• 7 years ago

If you're implying Brave is not open-source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/blob/master/LICENSE

matt40772• 7 years ago

Because Brave is a fraudulent attempt by some egotists to insert themselves as middlemen between you and people actually producing whatever you're reading on the web.

chowells• 7 years ago

That was my read on their initial plan. The way they've changed plans since then just makes me think they're clueless and not following any sort of principled vision.

I wouldn't call them frauds now. Now, I call them so out of touch that they're not worth supporting.

quantummkv3• 7 years ago

A whole lot of people are rubbed the wrong way by the whole cryptocurrency thing they have going on. And it's still chrome under the hood so you are still indirectly enforcing a lot of what google thinks is the best for it's bottom line.

forgotmypw32• 7 years ago

You're a couple years too late, Firefox has already been corrupted.

0xADADA• 7 years ago

Switched back when [Firefox Quantum](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox...) came out. Never looked back.

bootlooped• 7 years ago

I looked back repeatedly. For one I could never get it to launch Zoom from a link, it would always try to download the exe again. The Dark Reader extension is much slower on FF than Chrome. I think Chrome is still faster in general, I can tell especially when flipping through a bunch of tabs really fast.

When I came to the realization I was using FireFox essentially just for idealogical reasons I went back to Chrome.

microcolonel6• 7 years ago

Give Brave a try, it does a lot of things well, and it has some basic independence from Google's direct interests.

Yoric2• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with using a product because you believe in it?

pivo• 7 years ago

FWIW I use Firefox and zoom with no issues and am really happy with recent updates to the browser. Haven’t tried the dark reader extension though.

Tade0• 7 years ago

The other day I wowed my iPhone using co-workers by showing that Firefox for Android indeed allows you to install extensions.

chipotle_coyote4• 7 years ago

So does iOS Safari. Is the wow part specifically Firefox?

nullspace2• 7 years ago

This is news to me. How do I find and install extensions for iOS Safari?

bashinator• 7 years ago

Wait, I can install uBlock Origin on my iPhone?

irq• 7 years ago

So does iOS Safari.

This is incorrect. iOS Safari allows for rudimentary ad blockers to be installed. But no other sort of extensions are possible.

tech234a2• 7 years ago

There used to be an app called Kitt Browser that had ported some of the Chrome extension APIs to an iOS browser. It was acquired by Eyeo to make Adblock Browser for iOS.

Some resources relating to it are still online [1, 2] and Adblock Browser, which is derived from Kitt Browser, is open source [3, 4].

It would be cool if someone could make something out of it.

[1] https://github.com/kitt-browser

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=nfoWMgNYMkE

[3] https://github.com/adblockplus/adblockbrowserios-core

[4] https://github.com/adblockplus/adblockbrowserios

amingilani• 7 years ago

This topic's been discussed ad nauseam, I feel, but I made the switch a few months ago. It's a little painful, Firefox' performance when it comes to handling video is still sub-par, but that said, I'm much happier overall. The performance loss isn't too bad, and Firefox's Containers is a much better flow than Chrome's Profiles. I'd like it if MetaMask didn't glitch out with hardware wallets so much on Firefox, but I can hop onto Brave for that.

That said, I checked a site I was developing on Chrome a while ago, and for a moment, I thought I'd accidentally deployed to the apex domain. Thank goodness I switched before Chrome's anti-features went into overdrive. I don't think I'd be using Chrome when they did that, even if privacy weren't a huge concern of mine.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

For instance, Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster. “As you move from website to website, advertising networks essentially follow you so they can see what you’re doing so they can serve you targeted advertisements,” Dolanjski says. “Firefox is the only [major] browser out of the box that prevents that from happening.”

Uh, Safari?

Even if you do care, reading through Google Chrome’s 13,500-word privacy white paper, which uses a lot of technical jargon and obfuscates exactly what data the browser is tracking, isn’t helpful either.

Actually, I found it to be an interesting and relatively straightforward read: https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html

One downside to using Firefox is that many browser extensions are built primarily for Chrome

WebExtensions is pretty similar between Chrome and Firefox, isn't it?

my password manager luckily has a Firefox extension but it often causes the browser to crash

Scarbutt• 7 years ago

Where is ublock for safari? ;)

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

If you're referring to my first point, I'm talking about Intelligent Tracking Prevention.

chipotle_coyote4• 7 years ago

The OP was talking about things that Firefox and Safari both provide out of the box; neither one provides uBlock out of the box, AFAIK.

Personally, I'm perfectly happy using Better on Safari, after being somewhat reluctantly driven to using ad blockers a few years ago.

https://better.fyi

(Having said that, Safari 13's "now does even less!" approach to extensions is finally making me consider switching back to Firefox after all these years, even though I don't actually use many extensions.)

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

>> my password manager luckily has a Firefox extension but it often causes the browser to crash
!!

If he's got the one I'm thinking of, it's more of a testament to how crappy LastPass's Firefox support is than a problem with FF itself.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

Extensions should never cause browsers to crash, no matter how poorly written they are.

kken• 7 years ago

These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox all the time, never switched to Chrome.

Why should I have switched to Chrome, again?

AlexCoventry• 7 years ago

It was faster and more secure. It's probably still more secure.

ajross• 7 years ago

Exactly. It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it, but it's hard to convey just how much of an innovation Chrome was when it landed in the browser world of the late aughts. We'd been subjected, at that point, to almost 15 years of perpetual bloat and decay by Netscape and then Microsoft.

Chrome wasn't just faster, it was viscerally faster (V8 in particular was just completely without peer at the time). It was cleaner, without all the buttons and features adorning its competitors.

We all swapped instantly. Really it was amazing. But that was 11 years ago, Chrome has grown the warts IE used to have, and Firefox has largely caught up on the features geeks care about.

hanoz2• 7 years ago

Absolutely agree. I'm mystified that so many people abandoned the consistently excellent Firefox for the debatably equal but run by Google Chrome.

quantummkv3• 7 years ago

Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.

hkmurakami• 7 years ago

Iirc Google didn't quite have today's reputation in 2008 or whenever it first came out. My peers genuinely believed that their don't be evil slogan was genuine

bobbylarrybobby• 7 years ago

Things Chrome had around the time when it debuted that made it stand out: A unified search and website address bar Separate processes for tabs so that if one crashed, it didn't take the whole browser down with it Flash built in

plorkyeran• 7 years ago

When Chrome came out the fact that it was built by Google was a positive, not a negative.

shantly3• 7 years ago

When I switched Firefox liked to make my Macbook run hot and to trigger frequent system-wide beachballs when it wasn't foregrounded, with just a few tabs loaded. And just having it open killed my battery. This was, like, 2011 I think. Chrome didn't do these things, even with way more tabs. I'd used FF almost exclusively since it was called Phoenix, before that, though I hadn't loved and evangelized it since some time in the 2.x series.

Of course I moved to Safari after that when I realized I could gain like another 1.5-2hrs of battery life over even Chrome, and Firefox has largely replaced Chrome as the thing I use if I need something non-Safari, now.

cbsks• 7 years ago

When Chrome first came out it was much faster and leaner than Firefox. The gap has closed significantly in the past few years.

I used Chrome as my main browser for a year or so before switching back to Firefox. I’m glad that Firefox is now catching up again, hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again. Occasionally I will come across a website which was clearly only tested on Chrome.

hanoz2• 7 years ago

It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

CivBase• 7 years ago

I originally switched about a decade ago because Chrome was significantly more stable for me. I gave FF another shot when they released quantum. I experienced some stability issues at first, but I now consider it to be a superior browser.

I use Chrome and FF simultaneously at work because Google holds hangouts for ransom and that's our enterprise IM solution. Recently, FF seems to be much more stable than Chrome.

I also use FF on my smartphone and, IMO, it's a significantly better experience than Chrome.

The one feature I really miss from Chrome is the ability to easily switch between browser profiles. You can use the about:profiles page on Firefox for a similar effect, but it's nowhere near as seamless as Chrome.

kenhwang• 7 years ago

But Firefox always had superior and better performing AdBlock which made whatever speed advantage Chrome had pretty irrelevant.

I think the draw to Chrome for developers at the time was the better built-in dev tools compared to Firebug.

andai2• 7 years ago

On my old hardware, Chrome based browsers run significantly faster. Faster startup, significantly faster page loading. More responsive UI (new tab, new window etc). Once a web app loads it’ll be equally fast though.

I keep switching back to Firefox as it’s supposedly “as fast now” but it never was, and on my hardware, it still isn’t.

I gotta add to this that when it comes to ethics and privacy there is no contest. But the bulk of Mozilla’s funding coming from its arch-nemesis is tragi-comical.

tekknik5• 7 years ago

hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again

I’m a webdev and we’re still fighting this one and will be for a while. Chrome has such a huge market share it’s hard to convince the decision makers to consider even Safari, much less Firefox. Please help give those of us fighting for Chrome alternatives and give us something to back up our arguments better than “But Google!!”

abnry• 7 years ago

Around 2011 I switched from Firefox on my macbook pro to Chrome because Firefox was unusable because it was too slow.

benburleson• 7 years ago

Dev tools were superior for a while, I think.

bureaucrat• 7 years ago

It’s still superior.

mxcrossb• 7 years ago

There was a period where every web forum discussion of Firefox included a joke about memory leaks. I’m surprised no one remembers this...

hprotagonist• 7 years ago

must’ve slipped my mind.

kps• 7 years ago

Firefox's ‘quantum’ migration killed off some significant extensions (e.g vimperator/pentadactyl) introduced a bunch of new bugs, some of which remain.

staticassertion4• 7 years ago

It's a little silly to ignore the impact that Chrome had on the browser market. A from-scratch multiprocess architecture, considerable performance improvements, a fairly significant departure with UI, etc.

Sandboxed flash was huge at the time. People forget so quickly that only a decade ago the internet was a lot more malicious. Exploits hosted on compromised ads were not uncommon at all. These days all of the big exploit kits rely on social engineering.

Those were very appealing things for many people, rightfully so.

BuckRogers4• 7 years ago

That's true, but Google replaced websites exploiting users, to doing the honor themselves.

war10255• 7 years ago

I agree that Chrome has been good for healthy competition in the browser market. What I don't agree with is that Firefox hasn't been holding it's own the whole time.

They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly.

I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".

hoorayimhelping• 7 years ago

Not just the browser market, but software in general.

Remember when people had a conniption about Chrome auto updating and now literally all software does that?

Remember when using tabs was kind of a chore and not really worth the effort? Remember when the chrome of a browser would take up 10% of the screen? Remember when browsers had an address bar and a search bar? Remember when installing extensions was a huge, painful process?

This whole, "I don't get it," thing is so transparent and juvenile.

tekknik5• 7 years ago

Who is ignoring it? Also keep in mind most of these security benefits only helped Windows. There’s a lot of non-windows users here who had app level sandboxing before Chrome sandboxed Flash. Regardless of what they did they’re too “Googlfied” these days and Chrome is a massive window into your personal data. People that have done good things can go on to doing bad things.

johnpowell• 7 years ago

When Chrome came out I didn't have the problem with Google I have now. But I could never switch to Chrome because I hate having the tabs above the address bar. At least with Firefox I could tweak userChrome.css to keep tabs right above the content. So I never switched either.

Causality1• 7 years ago

It gets harder all the time though. It was the default, then it was an option in about:config, then you could tweak userChrome.css, and now loading userChrome.css is disabled by default. The day is coming when we won't be able to do it at all. User control crumbles bit by bit, slowly but surely.

war10255• 7 years ago

My conclusion as someone who never felt like Firefox was slow enough to be an issue, even when Chrome first came out, is that people must go to much more adware-laden sites than I ever do.

The only times I ever had Firefox perform in the laggy and stuttering ways people always describe have been when I get sucked into the "20 things you can't believe she said" type articles where every page is an exercise in squeezing the most ads per unit area.

Really it's just incentive for me to not waste time on that garbage. Plus now Firefox blocks most ads by default.

matt40772• 7 years ago

There's nothing wrong with switching to FF, but I feel Google is getting an awful lot of somewhat undeserved accusations. Specifically, lots of people interpret all changes in Chrome as attempts to (directly) bolster Google's advertising business.

This seems undeserved, considering Chrome has a track record that is rather spotless in that regard: they didn't ban ad blocking, never even attempted to send the click-stream into their user targeting, etc.

A lot more of Chrome can be better explained by a slightly different motivating mechanism: Google needs to keep the open web at parity with native software/apps, because it's the open web where they earn money. This is far more important than any marginal change in ad blocking or whatever else these conspiracy theories see as the upside for Google. This model perfectly explains PWAs, for example.

Another under-analysed issue are the comparisons with Microsoft/Internet Explorer's monopoly problem: The issue with IE was that it was closed-source, only available on Windows, and included strange runtimes for content that no other client had a chance to access.

None of those issues align with anything in Chrome's position today. Chrome has a large market share, and to some extend the evolution of the web platform. But with Chrome leading the way, the web platform has seen an unprecedented success in terms of standardisation, performance, and features in the last five years or so.

I get that people invested in existing standardisation process feel sad for the demise of their bureaucracy. But it's working rather well because Chrome's and users' interests align. And there isn't even an obvious mechanism for this to change, since other players such as Apple seem to be unthreatened in their position of having a de-facto veto.

kwijibob• 7 years ago

I think Google love this kind of media exposure and promotion of Firefox. It protects them from antitrust complaints and they are not too threatened by Mozilla Firefox.

judge20202• 7 years ago

There will possibly be a tipping point, especially if developers do the IE thing (or now Chrome thing) and only test their sites on one browser; currently a large portion of the education, private, and public sectors rely on the word of their vendors for which browser their app works best on (mostly Chrome because of its 10 year dominance). If all of the developers go to Firefox, and the sentiment changes from Chrome to Firefox, we might start seeing dual-install deployments and eventually firefox-only. That is, if Google hadn't been pushing their GSuite offering for the past few years and managed to tie a large amount of both private sector and education organizations to Chrome for the integration and MDM.

timwis• 7 years ago

Chrome shares my IP address with the websites I visit?! :O (lol)

osamagirl69• 7 years ago

The issue here is that it also shares them with Google, and in many cases shares a history of websites you have visited with other websites.

nbst2• 7 years ago

“We put the user first in terms of privacy,”

What a joke. How quickly people forget that they installed extensions into user's computers without their permission, and worse, didn't seem to realize the consequences of what that meant.

jtmarl1n• 7 years ago

Extensions like pocket and the Mr. Robot thing? Yeah, bad execution and communication, but privacy invading?

quantummkv3• 7 years ago

Unless I am mistaken, the extension never collected any user data and phoned it to a nebulous ad network. So user data still remained private

nbst2• 7 years ago

When a request is made to a server, the server creates a log of it. When you interacted with the site that the plugin worked in tandem with, it requested assets (JavaScript, images, CSS, etc) to Firefox-run servers. That's enough for them to know you looked at that content and may have interest in it. Not a huge deal in that particular instance but it's CERTAINLY not putting the user's privacy first.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 7 years ago

What's the difference b/w "installing an extension without permission" and "shipping a feature without permission"?

rsync• 7 years ago

I made this switch about 12-ish months ago when the writing was on the wall about ad-blocking and ... something about auto-creating a "chrome account" something something ...

I've been fairly disappointed in the lack of flexibility that firefox provides and the real lack of maturity (and even usability) of the containers feature.

I think I expected the move to firefox to bring with it a lot more flexibility and a richer set of configurations and customizations and this really isn't the case.

Instead, my firefox experience has been surprisingly restrictive. Unless, of course, I am willing to install a bunch of add-ons, all of which come with the obligatory "access all of your data" and are from just some random dude on the net.

Some specific issues:

- I want to define a "home page" BUT I also want both new tabs and new windows to open with a blank page. You cannot do this. As soon as you set both new tab and new window to "blank page", the fn+opt+leftarrow shortcut ceases to do anything.

- I want to use containers. Containers are only tabs. That makes no sense. The very first thing you want to do with a container, after learning what containers are, is open a Window and have all future tabs in that window inherit the container that that Window is. This is the basic use-case of the container feature and it doesn't exist. Instead, every use of container is mouse-mouse-mouse-click-click-click (since there is no key shortcut for them) and then open a tab for a single use. We should be making container windows and using key shortcuts to open tabs in those windows.

- I can't force-title a firefox Window - it just gets the title of the currently open tab. All manner of interesting Window management can be done, outside of firefox, if you can lock the Window title. I could create 6-8 ffox Windows, just like I create 6-8 spaces in GNU Screen, and quickly hotkey between them ... I see no way to do this.

- The fixation on tabs is, itself, a bit weird ... I don't think either a window-centric nor a tab-centric workflow should be favored - they should be equally developed and enabled.

DHPersonal• 7 years ago

Even worse, the Containers don't sync, so they have to be remade for every device. I really like the idea of the Container extension, but it needs a lot of work from Mozilla to be something I could recommend to others.

netfl03• 7 years ago

Have you made a feature request? It’s likely this is already on the roadmap.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

Firefox was dumbed down when they ditched XUL and followed Chrome's lead. Hopefully they will see the light and add more power to the extensions than Google will ever let Chrome have.

Still waiting for a non-hacky way to hide the tab bar.

netfl03• 7 years ago

I agree, though I think the reasoning was security unfortunately. They were likely trying to address legitimate issues with some large portion of the user base.

netfl03• 7 years ago

Chrome doesn’t even have a containers feature to improve in the direction you’d like.

x1798DE• 7 years ago

I find it easier to compartmentalize my browsing with Chrome profiles than with Firefox tabs. I was really disappointed with the container tabs feature because it seemed like it was designed to do what I already do with Chrome profiles, but it ended up being essentially unusable.

microcolonel6• 7 years ago

FWIW I segment by browsing with Chrome/Brave "profiles" and it's great. I can open a profile with no open windows from the Ctrl + Shift + m menu (along with guest windows), and context menus in all profiles then get an option to open a link in any open profile. The profiles are represented clearly on the filesystem, and can be copied.

Corrado• 7 years ago

I mostly agree with these complaints. Containers are the thing that both excited me and disappointed me the most about Firefox. I envisioned a world where I could open a couple of different browser windows and have all the tabs share a container. This would be great for things like working in multiple Google accounts, or multiple AWS accounts. However I found that containers are not very easy to use and I still don't know exactly how they work or which extension I should be using to make them do what I think they should do.

My advice to Firefox would be to get containers working in a easy to explain fashion and the world will beat a path to your door. I'm already using containers to limit Facebook's access to my world; it should be just as easy to use the same power for everything.

BuckRogers4• 7 years ago

You're absolutely correct. It's also true that you have to play around a bit with the container addons to get it functioning as you'd expect, but please believe that you're not alone out there on how you want it to work. For example, my vision of containers was built out with the Containerise extension. A version of that needs to be built into Firefox.

To do what you're asking, I haven't looked for addons to do it, but you'd probably have to do it manually. Open a window, then open a container and spawn everything else out from there. Assigning a container to a browser window sounds entirely plausible, useful, and I like it.

There's only a few real use cases for containers that make sense or are useful and that's a new one (to me). If Mozilla did that and duplicated Containerise, they'd have yet-another killer feature.

I think Mozilla's biggest problem must be management or bureaucracy, because they have a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit like this just waiting.

yoasif_• 7 years ago

I envisioned a world where I could open a couple of different browser windows and have all the tabs share a container. This would be great for things like working in multiple Google accounts, or multiple AWS accounts.

Sounds like you want https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/sticky-window-conta...

sorenjan• 7 years ago

I know you said you have reservations against installing add-ons, but that's really the best way to add features that aren't widely used. Modularity is flexibility.

Set custom window title: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-titleb...

All future tabs in a window keep the same container as the first: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sticky-window...

Both have links to their Github page if you want to look at the code and see what they do with their data permissions.

I don't know what "fn+opt+leftarrow" is a shortcut to. I haven't used a home page in years, I save my tabs between sessions and use bookmarks and the built in search bar.

zncoder• 7 years ago

Agree with the mouse-click part. I made this addon to make container a little bit easier to use, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/confiner/. Every page is opened in an ephemeral container. But you can easily make the container for a specific site persistent.

FillardMillmore• 7 years ago

It seems like we've had a discussion about this article every few months since its publication - not necessarily a bad thing, but just an observation.

I've been a Firefox user since before Chrome was launched - it was one of the very few alternatives to IE at the time. And during these years, it was a breath of fresh air. When Chrome launched, as others have noted, Google leveraged its coffers to provide the new browser with extensive advertising and PR and of course, the icing on the cake, it actually was a great browser too.

I never ran benchmarks or anything but there were certainly a number of years in which Chrome did seem like a faster browser. That said, I was always skeptical because the browser was a Google product. But I stuck with Firefox except for rare cases, mostly in the past 5 or so years, where certain sites didn't even appear to function properly without it (it being Chrome).

Because of sites like these, I am at least appreciative that there are other Chromium-based browsers (which now, apparently include Microsoft Edge) that offer more or less the same site functionality as Chrome without having to directly leverage a Google product.

I for one quite like Brave and its privacy features, including its defaults. Blocking ads by default is great, though of course, Brave compensates for this by presenting its own ads (which are still annoying, but less so to me). I like the ability to use Tor and DuckDuckGo easily just by starting a private window. It also seems to me that Brave is just as fast, if not faster than Firefox. In addition to this, you can use almost every Chrome extension on the Brave browser (for me, the important stuff is uBlock Origin, Dark Reader, and a Password Manager). I know many here are skeptical or disapproving of the 'Brave Rewards' cryptocurrency - and I get that. But I have completely ignored it (it is an opt-in system) and I am no worse for wear.

Suffice it to say, I'm a long-time Firefox supporter - I still do use it somewhat frequently but I'm slowly shifting to Brave. I try not to use Chrome (though I appreciate what its impact has been on the browser space as a whole) and Microsoft's efforts with Edge at least provide amusing diversions. If you're running old SharePoint sites, Microsoft's browsers are still a must-have.

topmonk• 7 years ago

Brave compensates for this by presenting its own ads (which are still annoying, but less so to me)

I exclusively use brave on android, linux and windows and don't have replacement ads. I've read that you can opt into viewing ads in exchange for receiving a cryptocurrency token, but since I'm in a region that isn't offered, have never seen it. But I don't think it just plasters its own ads over the originals unless you opt into this “crypto for ad views” scheme.

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

I keep wanting to like Firefox but I prefer Brave right now. It seems like all the ease of Chrome and ad blocking and privacy too.

helpPeople• 7 years ago

Not sure why Firefox takes literally minutes to load a page.

Bugs are unacceptable.

Weirdly my wife has the same issue on her computer.

newscracker• 7 years ago

Mods: this needs to be tagged 2018. This article is now a year and a half old.

Google already runs a lot of my online life–it’s my email, my calendar, my go-to map, and all my documents.

I’d rather the author take care of this with urgency, in addition to switching from Chrome to Firefox.

Firefox Focus is one of the best things from Mozilla in the recent years. I use it more than any browser (including Firefox itself).

I’ve asked around before, but didn’t get a satisfactory answer. Mozilla Corporation (the one that funds Firefox development) gets more than 90% of its revenues from its search partnership with Google. So Firefox is, in a way, aligned to promoting Google to survive. If there were ways to fund Firefox more widely (not through some limited VPN service tie ups), that could make Mozilla bolder. Someone pointed out that while there’s an official Facebook Container extension for Firefox, there is no official Google Container extension. The Google Container is not created by Mozilla.

I’d really want to support Firefox (and related) development directly. In my understanding this is not possible because donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on open web initiatives and education.

pantsme• 7 years ago

Man I miss when chrome first came out and made the web so dang fast. Now it is the heaviest app I have on my computer by far. We need a Chrome Lite.

I have been enjoying Brave lately though.

18monthsin• 7 years ago

I never switched to chrome. I find it hilarious that the author thinks the decision to switch is forwardthinking enough to write about.

eddhead• 7 years ago

Been using the new Edge Beta for a year now, don't ever need Chrome for anything

paul79862• 7 years ago

it would be cool if DDG became Firefox's default search and or FF would promote/let users know they have a choice!

microcolonel6• 7 years ago

But they need that Google cash to pay for the social political decadence of the few, and the occasional productive development resource.

paul79862• 7 years ago

I bet if they made DDG the default in which a big rev share towards firefox was provided they'd be able to survive and more. Wouldn't be gangbusters like it is now with the big G, but maybe in the long run it would.

alex-wallish• 7 years ago

It's incredibly disappointing to me to learn that the majority of Firefox's revenue comes from promoting Google search. Maybe duckduckgo should build a browser.

Groxx• 7 years ago

2014-2017 was primarily from Yahoo, if that helps at all

Avi-D-coder• 7 years ago

The three reasons I can't seem to switch are tearing with compton and i3, startup time, and middle click not pasting when clicking the new tab button. Does anyone know how fix any of these behaviors?

The last one may seem minor, but it takes three clicks to achieve the same result as chrome for a task I do constantly.

How is Firefox on wayland with sway?

callekabo• 7 years ago

Long time user of Firefox on desktop, but recently moved away from Firefox on android after reading that it's "much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface".

https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

shadowprofile77• 7 years ago

My one problem with Firefox is that it's just so damn slow on any laptop I use. I've tried every update since the beginning of 2019 and little appreciable change on this. My laptops tend towards the cheap and they don't have much kick but if Firefox is decent enough, it should be able to perform as well as Chrome on them, and with Chrome I rarely have this problem on any of the same machines. If anyone can give me some idea of how to address this, would be nice.

i_am_proteus• 7 years ago

I have had the opposite experience: Firefox runs just fine on a T420i (2nd gen i3,4GB RAM, Ubuntu 18.04) a T450 (5th gen i5, 8GB RAM, Windows 10) and a 2011 Macbook Air (2nd gen i5, 4GB RAM, OSX Sierra).

fouc• 7 years ago

Is it the page scrolling that feels slow to you? That's configurable.

andai2• 7 years ago

I had the same experience with FF on laptops. Switched between FF and Chrome a few times then settled on Brave for a combination of Chromium’s performance, just without the Google :) It was a bit buggy but they’ve mostly ironed it out.

lenkite2• 7 years ago

I will switch when Firefox supports the OS native certificate store for client-certificate authentication. Until then its Chrome.

Yoric2• 7 years ago

I remember having this conversation with other Firefox security devs (I'm a Firefox dev myself). While I don't remember exactly why they are not supported, I remember that there was a very good security reason for this.

Also, while it's off by default, Firefox can be configured to support them: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1175296

lenkite2• 7 years ago

That method doesn't work for client certificate authentication. Thousands of organisations in the world generate client certificates for their users and populate them into the OS certificate store. Those certificates are then expected to be presented at the time of client-certificate authentication to the hundreds of apps that expect them.

The OS certificate in any enterprise company is "locked down" with extensive policies provided by the OS vendor. It is far harder to import/export certificate and key material from it than from Firefox's own certificate store. I know that my company runs has scripts that run regular background checks to validate certificates in the OS certificate store. If you want dev/test certificates, we even have an internal app that generates 'trusted' certificates for various purposes.

There was a reason that Chrome chose to move to the OS certificate store. They realised it would increase their market share in the enterprise. Firefox is a no-go because it continues to cling to its own custom store.

dang• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17189396

chewz• 7 years ago

I had been using Firefox during dark days and moved to Chrome (for other reasons) more or less at the time of Quantum release.

Since Chrome 78 it is very perverse feeling to see Chrome informing me (with cute little icon in omnibox) that it had blocked 3rd-party cookies from domains like google-analytics.com or doubleclick.com.

https://images.app.goo.gl/skf52r6Cndj7BvZp7

lcall• 7 years ago

I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power with Google, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chrome derivative), so I see these benefits:

1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea);

2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those sites where I need them (by exception only, and easy to do without a mouse once the tab is open), and

3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),

4) Maybe the security of Chrome/Iridium benefits from Google's bug bounties. I don't really know but I'm glad they try.

Given those things, are there still reasons I would prefer Firefox? (I am aware of OBSD removing DNS-over-HTTP from Firefox, indicating that is a choice that should be made by the user at the system level instead).

gaia• 7 years ago

If you NEED extensions, you should consider Vivaldi. Chrome engine, but doesn't require login to google and has better default privacy settings.

Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox (2018)

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