• ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I very much recommend against that (though I think everyone’s downvotes are a bit much).

    If privacy isn’t your thing, consider performance; Firefox’s memory usage is vastly superior to Chrome’s, and its speed improvements are just too great to ignore. If you don’t care about either of those things, how about features: picture-in-picture on Firefox works better than on Chrome, on-device translation is faster than anything Google can dish out, and the developer features are industry-leading. If none of those are a big deal for you, think about platform purpose: Chrome is unilaterally making decisions about their browser that are causing downstream effects for every user (like the recent spyware-as-a-service “Privacy Sandbox,” or the upcoming extension-crippling Manifest v3 updates) because you are not their customer. You are their product. And if none of those things move the needle, you should be aware that the aforementioned forced switch to Manifest v3 this summer will essentially break ad-blocking extensions across the board.

    If you’re concerned about migration, you should know that the migration experience is currently a cake walk. It takes two clicks to migrate everything from Chrome to Firefox. In a very real way, considering all the time I used to spend waiting for Chrome’s bloated carcass to finish rendering something, or all the time I used to spend clicking “x” on all the newsletter, cookie, and login popups, it actually would’ve taken me longer not to switch.

    If you’re concerned about user experience post-switch, you should know that there are currently an absolutely minuscule number of sites that render differently from Chrome to Firefox, and even fewer that refuse to work on Firefox (almost all of which can be accessed using a user-agent switcher with no problems). Feature parity is almost literally one-to-one; the only major feature I can think of that exists in Chrome but not in Firefox is tab groups, and the developers are working on those. And if you so desire, you can even do a few minor configuration tweaks to make Firefox look exactly like Chrome, too.

    Now, if you’re absolutely dead-set on sticking with Chromium for some bizarre reason, you might consider an alternative fork of Chromium; Brave, ungoogled, Opera, and Vivaldi are all Chromium-based browsers which will run all the same plugins you already have without being directly under the control of Google.

    If you go that route, or if you’re still completely undeterred from Chrome, there’s a version of the AMP to HTML plugin for Chrome, too. At least for now, until Google decides to kill that, too.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Firefox has been my primary browser on my Pixel 2, Pixel 6, and Pixel 7 for nearly five years now. It consistently performs at least as well as Chrome. Yes, it used to have horrible performance, but that hasn’t been true in a very long time.

              • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Now, sure, there are some sites that load faster on Chrome, but that’s largely due to the source site, not the browser: AMP sites, for instance, are cached on a Google server and served more quickly to Chrome than to Firefox. That’s not Firefox being slow, it’s Firefox playing by the rules.

                And that’s good. Technically speaking someone could hoover up every website on the internet, precache every article, and serve it to you from their servers instead of from the actual source servers; but that would be absolutely terrible from the perspective of the open web. That someone could decide they don’t like your site, or the way you represented something, or whatever, and just change your articles or delete them. Suddenly your site runs slower than everyone else’s and users don’t know why, so they stop using your site.

          • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            And I’m writing this comment on Chrome on the same device. Performance is equally great, though inputting the 2fa code was a pain on Chrome because it tried to “help” with the password entry.