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Or even better, a fork of Firefox which disable all that telemetry crap and bundle with uBlock Origin : LibreWolf.
uBlock Origin*
uBlock is the pseudo-malware that profited off of uBO’s good name.
but hardened firefox 😏
Shut up, you godless furry
This!
Godless furry bot: when
Is it as simple to use out of the box as Firefox or does it require some tinkering first?
No tinkering required, technically you could achieve the same result with regular Firefox + tinkering.
It’s as simple out of the box but with a greater focus on privacy with telemetry off and the pocket integration disabled.
Sounds great! Thanks for the info 🙂
Fr, people need to stop the lies that firefox itself is a privacy respecting browser, which it isnt- not since it was bought out years back.
LibreWolf and Mullvad are great examples of Firefox Forks that are ACTUALLY privacy focused browsers.
Bought out? Firefox was never bought out by anyone. What are you talking about?
My bad, bought out was the wrong way to word it- I should have said “Made partnerships with-” then listed Google and Yahoo(defunct), China and Russia.
If you watch this video discussing how privacy respect firefox is by default- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr8UFJzpNls you’ll see the telemetry they collect is miles long and Firefox is no better at protecting your privacy than Chrome/Chromium is whatsoever.
Definitely recommend Librewolf or Mullvad, which are actual privacy respecting browsers, even Chromium forks like Brave are better than default firefox.
The new Mullvad browser is even better, and regularly maintained. But a little bit further down on the privacy end of the Spectrum and further from the useability end. Watch out for timezones, that one always gets me!
Mullvad has a browser now? Sweet! I’ve been a fan of their no nonsense approach to VPN for a while now.
Yeah it’s basically TOR browser without the TOR network. Created in direct collaboration with TOR.
Stumbled over that last week. There is a company where I buy nearly all my computer stuff from, and I’m a customer for more than 20 years.
I wanted to order parts for a high-end PC, but simply could not add the motherboard to the shopping cart. Everything else was already in there. I called them, and they asked me if I used Firefox. And they told me in no uncertain terms that Firefox was dead and would no longer be supported for “safety and security reasons”, I should use Chrome or Edge instead.
If their site is too stupid to cope with Firefox, why the heck does it not tell me about this upfront, e.g. when I try to enter an item into the shopping cart?
I’ve had a few websites tell me to view their website in Chrome. I just leave, because no way am I putting any kind of personal data into a website run by such incompetent people.
I used to be a web developer. Back 8 years ago, you used to have to do a lot of special tricks to make your website look and function the same in all the browsers. Now, you really don’t. Unless you’re using some really obscure closed source codec or something, websites literally render and function properly without needing any browser specific code fixes.
There’s no excuse, unless you’re blocking older versions of every browser for security reasons, which is fine, because browsers update automatically these days, and it’s very rare for someone to be running a really old version.
Usually the thing about the webpage not working is just codeword for “we have not tested it and we won’t”. If you really need to access it, there are some extensions that can change your user agent so the page thinks you are in chromium.
This is the one I use.
Chameleon is another good plugin for this
I use an user agent switcher in those cases. Most of the time it works and I dont have to change the browser.
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While you are basically right with that, just imagine the computer shop where all the IT professionals go to get their stuff. I’m a customer there for more than 20 years because they are good. If there was any good alternative, I might be tempted to change, but so far I have not heard of such a thing.
Funnily enough, I can’t log into my bank on chrome, but Firefox works just fine.
That sucks.i am not going to not use Firefox, fuck chrome
I had issues with my banking app and a few other sites that use my personal government issued 2 factor auth…
But only in firefox.
Firefox rules, people need to smarten up. Hell, Firefox on Android has an Adblock extension. Firefox is what’s up.
It’s also as fast, if not faster, than Chrome now.
Is Firefox for Android getting faster as expected? Last time, it seems very slow. I might switch back from Vivaldi if tests seem very well.
I recently switched to Firefox Nightly on Android and haven’t noticed it being any slower than the previous chromium browser I was using. I did opt to forgo the Dark Reader add-on for it though since that was slowing down webpage rendering a bit.
I recently switched from Opera to Firefox.
I was getting 59 FPS average in Opera, full bore 165 FPS / Hz in Firefox.
I didn’t -want- to switch but it’s objectively faster, especially on Linux.
The issue for me with Firefox on Android is it would sometimes refuse to load pages when switching back after being suspended from the background and I have no clue why. I’d have to open a new tab and copy the URL to force it to load and it was so frustrating.
I use Brave now (with the promotional stuff off, even though I still don’t fully trust them), since it seems to be the only other ad-blocking browser on Android that’s even decently easy to use. However, I still use Firefox on Windows with tree style tabs and raindrop.io to sync bookmarks, both of which are god tier productivity tools.
I get this issue every now and then with Chrome.
There’s a work around for Firefox nightly that allows installation of any add-on too, eg sponsor block.
The fact that it needs a workaround is still bullshit.
No work around is needed. You can install a very limited number of extensions on Firefox mobile and they are the ones you want the most. This includes uBlock Origen.
hey are the ones **you **want the most
You don’t know which extensions I want most. I want:
- uBlock Origin ✅
- Consent-o-Matic ❌ - but the sort of thing they might eventually add to the blessed list with enough begging
- Bypass Paywalls ⛔ - Mozilla will never recommend this or even distribute it on its addons site
3-4 years ago, I could install any extension I wanted. I reject their stated reasons for barring me from doing so (security, stability - those are on me once I start installing unsupported add-ons) and use Kiwi Browser instead.
does android firefox have a desktop mode for tablets / dex?
Wait it does? I need to go look into that.
Privacy is like the least important reason I use Firefox. With Microsoft Edge and Opera being based on Chromium now there are just so many of them. With Chromium essentially becoming the de facto standard because everyone uses it that means Google can ignore web standards and just do whatever they want.
What are the important reasons?
Everything else I said, sorry if that wasn’t clear!
Essentially there are organizations like W3C and IEEE that define standards for how the internet works and how websites behave. All browsers follow these so everything works properly. Let’s say you have some idea you want to add to your browser you develop. You do it and tell everyone about it. You don’t have many users. Maybe a few sites do it but it isn’t really a problem that it doesn’t work on other browsers because so few people do it.
Chromium has a massive market share because so many browsers use it as their base. Even Opera and Microsoft Edge which historically have been alternatives to Google Chrome now use Chromium as their base. The danger is that Chromium has such a large user base that they are essentially what the standard is.
As a quick aside, Chromium is the name for the open source base of Google Chrome. Chrome itself is technically not open source. This jus thust in case you or other readers haven’t seen that word.
Imagine a world where everyone uses Chromium. Why would you (if you were in charge of Chromium) need to listen to what standards organizations say about how the web should work? You’re literally in charge of every browser! You can just add some new features or take some out and every website would have to comply because you (in this hypothetical) truly do control every single web browser on the planet. Their websites would not work otherwise.
Sure, out of the goodness of your heart you might behave and be a good steward but there will always be reasons for you to act against the standards that you don’t view as “bad” that other people might think are bad. I’m not saying all standards organizations are perfect and good or anything like that, but I believe I trust them more than Google.
Even if Google never does anything “bad” (naive thinking lol) avoiding the situation where they have that kind of power is a good thing.
To me that’s the most important reason to use a non-Chromium based browser. To avoid Chromium becoming the one true browser.
And just for some context, Google has done bad things before with regards to web standards and then having the de facto standard with Chrome. The recent changes to the extension API to neuter ad blocking being a prime example. And we don’t even have to speculate and sound like nutjobs. They’re a public company. They’ve said before that ad-blocking is one of the biggest threats to their ad revenue. Not that it feels tin foil hatty to suggest even if they hadn’t said it, but they actually have said it in reports.
organizations like W3C and IEEE that define standards for how the internet works and how websites behave
Too bad those organizations kept dragging their feet, writing standards by committee and making them unimplementable, pushing stuff like XHTML that nobody in their sane mind wanted… until the WHATWG called quits on them and focused on a working living standard: a reference free open source browser that anyone could just copy+paste to meet the standard.
Nowadays we call that “Chromium”.
Why do you believe Google would not be able to ignore the WHATWG the same way they could ignore other standards organizations if they controlled the entire browser market?
Well, for starters the WHATWG listens to Google, not the other way around. And yeah, they do “control” the entire “browser market”, or more precisely, the part they care about: how to show ads.
Then you’re just agreeing but saying it’s already happened.
That’s one way of seeing it.
I don’t agree with the W3C or IEEE defining the standards anymore, or with Chromium becoming a “de facto” standard; the whole point of creating the WHATWG was to explicitly ditch the W3C, make Chromium into the basis for a living standard… and everyone clapped (except for some die hards who didn’t get the memo).
That it allows Google to destroy the open internet by changing the standards until non-Chromium browsers can’t engage with the web.
Oh yeah I fully get that. I think that’s very important too. The reason why I asked is because I thought there was a nifty feature I wasn’t aware of.
That it allows Google to destroy the open internet by changing the standards until non-Chromium browsers can’t engage with the web.
Im glad the websites have a saying in this. If google also owns these all then we are TRULY fucked.
Unfortunately, no, they don’t. As Chromium gets more and more wide spread, Google is gaining the power to change the browser standards. Websites will have to comply. If your website suddenly “Breaks” because Google won’t allow Chromium load any pages without tracking tags, users will complain to you and not google.
Yeah tech illiteracy is a thing thats true. Once they realize that its their browser that breaks their shit they will just pick a different one. Thats what i mean with google owning all the websites.
I don’t think they will. I think corporations - Who make decisions the same way soulless psychopaths would - will bend.
Using Chromium supports the destruction of the open internet.
unpopular opinion: chromium is a genuinely good thing for everyone involved. Just because chrome gets all the bitches and can dictate stuff doesnt mean chromium will break the competitions will to have their own programmers make their own fork.
Good joke.
You know what happens if a customer complains your website doesn’t work in Chrome? A bug ticket is raised, goes to a developer and they fix the “bug” so it works again.
If the developer is good they’d also make sure their “fix” doesn’t break the website for Firefox and Safari. But there are plenty of developers who only test Chrome and call it a day.
Chrome is the default browser nowadays, if it doesn’t work in Chrome you have a problem. The developer might blame Google, but the user and management won’t care.
Thats fine. Because it means the websites are ok with what chrome is doing and it doesnt hurt them. No joke bro…
websites not supporting firefox is the site’s fault, not the browser’s. firefox is not some niche browser. almost every website i have used is fine on firefox, and when it rarely doesnt work (usually bc i have a configured librewolf), i just open brave or whatever.
I just use chrome when it doesn’t work since it’s such a rare occurrence. There is no reason for me to use chrome on a daily basis.
Not everyone has this luxury, but I just close the website and never use it. So far, I haven’t run into anything major that doesn’t work with firefox, so this strategy has been working for me so far.
I occasionally switch to chrome as a troubleshooting step when a website doesnt work, and it rarely is firefox the problem.
Im really confused by this sentiment. Ive been using Firefox since like 2007 and I was just a teenager who didn’t know any better.
Its been working fine for 16 years now.
Personally, I stopped using Firefox when mobile became my main computing device. When I had shitty phones and mobile browsers were newer, Chrome was much more stable for me than FF. I should try to break the habit and go back to FF now that they are both structurally sound, but by now I have years of stuff saved to and remembered by Chrome. It would be a hassle to switch, and somewhat more control of a portion of my data isn’t worth the trouble to me. I’m still gonna use Instagram for professional networking and personal posting, so I’m gonna be in packaged data anyway.
All that stuff you have saved isn’t important. You won’t even miss what you saved.
That’s like not moving into a better home because you don’t want to lose what’s in your junk drawer in the kitchen.
Edit. Three downvotes with no replies? No one cares to explain thier point of view?
I perpetually want to document and keep things but learning that browsing history, tabs, bookmarks, and cookies are disposable trash that I know I truly don’t give a fuck about was enlightening. A clean slate is actually great!
Man, what you said is so true. A few years ago, when I switched from Chrome to Brave (I now use Firefox), one of my worries was losing all the “important” stuff I had saved over the years. As you said, those things weren’t important at all, I don’t even remember what they were.
For those of you who are like that: change now, you won’t regret it and if you really need to save something, just copy/paste those links into a word or any other program.
I didn’t downvote but I’m thinking of some extension configurations as things I don’t think have export/import support
yeah having all your stuff saved in chrome would make it a hassle. sounds like a rainy day project haha
Even better idea. Wait until about 6pm, open maybe 7 beers and drink them over a four hour time frame. At 10pm, start mixing some cocktails (you can do this beforehand and just store them in the fridge), make sure you have plenty, as over the next 2 hours, you’ll need them.
Finally, at 12am, get yourself a nice spirit you enjoy, so maybe a good whisky, a good tequila, a good rum. Anything you like, and start mixing, 50ml alcohol, to about 250ml mixer is what I personally enjoy.
Once you hit 12, just get your things done. Whether it’s moving data over. Or just anything that needs to be done. Unless it involves leaving your house. As that may get messy.
This is what I always do when I know I need to get something done. And it hasn’t let me down yet.
Oh, and don’t forget your favourite music.
Don’t forget to speaker phone your ex at some point! Spice that night up baby
Damn you stuck with it during it’s trash years, too?
It wasn’t even acceptable until pretty recently, and it’s still missing a lot of QoL features that make me keep Vivaldi around (except on my Linux machines, those just run Fox cause Vivaldi isn’t available.)
You have been writing comments on this thread for 5 hours. Have you gone outside today? Make sure to drink some water as well.
Nah, for any functions I’ve missed there has been a Firefox addon so far. My fave QOL addon is Tree Style Tab
Then you want to hide the horizontal tabs bad in the top, with an extra CSS file in the Firefox folder. Instructions here
I’m not ready to de-google, as I use the suite for my business stuff (drive, docs, calendar, mail etc), maybe one day though.
How does it integrate? Can I still keep the convenience I get from Chrome for the rest of the Google tools or is it pointless to switch if I don’t switch everything else as well?
ive alwasy had a high end PC around so ive never had issues with it.
Depending on which distro you’re on, Vivaldi is most certainly on Linux. I use mostly debian stuff and it works great on there.
“Firefox is bad because I got a virus one time and Firefox was my default browser therefore Firefox gave my computer a virus”- my brother
Chromium could be spying on you, as it communicates with google servers. You should use ungoogled-chromium, and hope they did a good job…
spoiler
or just use Firefox
Using ungoogled-chromium still contributes to Google’s browser engine monoculture.
That’s kind of awesome actually. I’ve been looking to replace brave for a while now while retaining the chromium feel.
Wait, people hate Firefox? Why??
Perhaps I’m missing something but I’ve been a Firefox user for years- at work and home. I have yet to find a website that misbehaves or under-performs. Mayyybe a few sites here and there a fractions of a second slower or have slightly less acceleration or something that I’m just not noticing?
Without Firefox and its ??forks?? like LibreWolf, the internet would be a total Chromium monopoly at this point, wouldn’t it? That would be bad…
I’ve been daily driving Firefox since 3 years ago, the only time it doesn’t load a site properly is when I lost internet connection mid-loading. Some people keep saying some sites don’t work with FF and yet none of them was able to give a single example.
The Oklahoma Natural Gas website sometimes won’t let me pay my bill if I’m using Firefox.
I actually had to install ungoogled-chromium to change my email on PayPal. No other browser would work, it was weird. That’s the only instance I can remember where I’ve had to try Chrome. Otherwise I FireFox has worked fine. Wonder what happened there.
I’ve used ha no issues with paypal on Firefox, odd
Some websites do poorly on it. However it’s rare and easy enough to just open it in a different browser. I’ve used Firefox for over 15 years and it’s not a serious issue. Usually bad government websites or shitty corporate webapps.
I’ve had some “Apply to Job” buttons on job sites not display in Firefox but show up fine in Chrome/Safari.
Cox cable had a button that wasn’t visible on ff, had to use edge.
Pre-2020 Edge or Chromium-based Edge?
Chromium edge is my goto when Firefox won’t work, I’ve seen the 4 mb of data ms has of mine, and it isn’t comparable to the 6+ gb Google has.
On what site/service is that?
I’ll let you know when I come across another, I’ve been applying a lot.
I’m a die-hard Firefox user (in part because I’m a web developer and prefer the dev tools). But I have seen a couple of sites that only work with Chromium-based browsers. Both are owned by Microsoft, though, so I assume they’re breaking things on purpose to push Edge or something. There’s no significant features Firefox is missing. (Safari is the problem child for web developers now. They tend to be last to support new CSS/JS features.)
Maybe it’s because I use sidebery but Firefox is very Laggy for me in comparison to chrome, I use it Firefox because I don’t like google’s practices, and I like my sidebar, but I do miss the speed of chrome when you have several tabs open
However, my problems may also be due to windows, I’ve been having issues with my pc and I Def need an OS wipe
I’ve used Firefox as my main browser for a year or two now, and it definitely wastes the most battery life and uses the most RAM on my laptop. I’ve had some websites (job sites) not display “Apply to Job” buttons properly. My Yubikey wasn’t supported on many websites with Firefox (only Chrome/Safari) until recently. Chrome feels stagnate, though - I love Firefox’s auto-pause, PiP, bookmarks tagging and keyword searches.
Pretty sure Safari runs on Gecko as well, but still, “Chromium monopoly” is such a ridiculous idea.
It’s like saying cars have a “V shaped engine monopoly” or clothes have a “YKK zipper monopoly.” Does it exist? Yeah. Does it affect the actual lineup of available products and their differences? Not really.
Gecko? Do you mean Blink?
Gecko is the name of Firefox’s renderer. Blink is the name of chrome’s. WebKit is the name of Safari’s.
It would not be correct to say that Safari uses Chrome’s renderer, but since Chrome started as a fork of WebKit, they should have some similarities.
But there is no genetic relationship whatsoever between Gecko and Safari.
If it really has to be a Chromium browser, Vivaldi will do the trick.
And if you REALLY take security seriously, LibreWolf is based on Firefox but without the annoying stuff from Mozilla attached to it.
Closed source browser run by a company? No thanks.
Vivaldi a privacy respecting browser? It’s closed source and barely has any concern on the matter.
How about ungoogled Chromium?
Isn’t Chromium already ungoogled and Chrome is the googled browser?
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You are fooling yourself if you think you can really “ungoogle” chromium.
How so? What’s wrong with Ungoogled Chromium (besides it being Chromium)?
I use firefox for obvious privacy reasons but also because I can customize the UI. Chromium’s interface is oversized, ugly, and locked down while on firefox I can change any aspect of it using my own CSS.
Also addons against ads which Google obviously wouldn’t allow on their crap browser.
How are you doing this? Firefox’s stock UI is even more oversize than Chrome’s and they are actively removing customization options to the UI.
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For daily usage, and as long as you use uBlock Origin, Firefox has been perfect for me for the past 10 years. I don’t understand those who complain about it.
A lot of fanboys are just gonna irrationally hate competitors. Star Wars vs. Star Trek and all that.
All of them are memory hungry, the point is how dynamic they are in their “hunger” and “excretion”.
Does the 34 and 20 represent the number of tabs? If so, this is not a fair comparison, what with FF having 50% more open. But even if that number doesn’t represent tabs, I am sure there can be websites that would put them much closer in performance.
Right now I have Chrome on my work machine. It has a 14 (again, not sure if those are active tabs or not) and it is eating 1.17 GB on my work machine. On my home FF (24) is eating 1.60 GB of RAM. FF is clearly using more RAM in each case, but it isn’t slowing my desktop down any more than Chrome is on my work machine. I’d like for it to improve, but rather use something other than Google’s tools on every single machine I use, I guess.
The number in parentheses is the number of processes that the application is performing. Win’s task manager groups these under the parent app so you don’t have to scroll through every “sub” in order to end a task. if you hit the “>” to the left of the app it will give you the expanded view and you will see the list.
Does the 34 and 20 represent the number of tabs?
Yes, more or less. I think some other extensions can take up processes too.
I actually have enough RAM and I’m glad that the RAM is being used to load all the stuff instead of the pagefile. It’s my fault that I’m not closing stuff, not the browser’s for not guessing what I’m going to re-load.
If you ask people, I think they’ll just say that their main browser is like that. And that’ll apply to all of them, so it’s a user problem.
I remember these talks from a very long time ago. Very long time, when Opera had its own engine and before. I think the gaps have shrunk a lot, especially now that Internet Exploder is gone.
I’ve been maining Firefox for over a year now and this has been the case for me as well - it’s such a resource hog. Which is fine, I’ve dealt with it, but I wish it didn’t use so much battery life.
For some reason, upload speeds to YouTube are atrocious. And if you read through the ticket about this issue, it’s not Google slowing it down artificially, but an actual Firefox issue. I have to resort to using Vivaldi as my dedicated upload browser.
That, and they have a weird drive to make their UI shittier and shittier. Introducing tons of whitespace, turning tabs into buttons, removing compact layout…
I have 15 extensions running on my 8GB work laptop and there is little to no difference from my 16GB PC battle station at home. And I have like 4 more apps run alongside 10 tabs of FF at work, way more than what I would ever open at home
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Of course your job would be even easier if there was only one engine left. Comparing it to what we had in the IE era though is completely bonkers.
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To name a big one: the CSS :has() pseudo-class.
How is this still not enabled by default?
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After the quantum update i switched to firefox, as now in performance it is almost on par with chrome or sometimes better.
I remember I switched to chrome way back when chrome was first becoming popular because of its speed compared to Firefox in like 2010 or something. Firefox caught up within a year and I have never missed Chrome for a second.
Oh, I was similar. When Chrome was new I liked it, but it seems to be vulnerable to get these weird superfluous add-ons that I may have acquired through malicious links. When I switched to Firefox I wasn’t as suseptible to malware, and the speed was just as good.
You mean it uses a bunch more of ram ?
For me Chrome uses more RAM, plus it’s usually some addon that slows down firefox more.
Vanadium on my phone.
Vanadium is a chromium based browser.
Indeed. But privacy is good. No point in using Firefox on phone since webview is chromium based.
