- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
10 Reasons You Should Switch From Chrome to Firefox.::The best browser sync out there.
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11: It’s the only browser on the market that is not either apple webkit or google chrome based. And it’s in our best interest to keep said market healthy, with as many competing actors as possible.
At some point there were more than 1 relevant browsers using Gecko, though. Somebody at Mozilla decided to gloriously triumph over allies by killing XULRunner and not offering a replacement.
Not sure if WebKit is such a bad choice in that context.
The Tor browser is still Firefox based. Not a large niche, but being THE preferred way to browse with Tor makes it on its own imho
Tor browser is just Firefox with a different default configuration and add-ons though.
As it should be. But honestly unless there needs to be a change there is no reason to fork.
Most of the chromium forks are just branding and proprietary features they want built in, with brave being the only one that feels a little more aggressive in changes from the base.
Tbf someone else mentioned arc browser which is chromium and seems to be pretty…different from base
Thanks for the info! Agreed that one seems to be trying to actually value add on top of its base.
Much like librewolf, my favorite desktop browser
Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.
IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.
Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.
Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.
A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.
Yes, I’m talking about that. I was using conkeror (Gecko-based browser with emacs-like controls, which is funny since for editing I’ve never learned emacs and use vi/vim) until it stopped being practical.
It really is telling that even Microsoft don’t find it viable to maintain a browser engine.
The “standards” are an absolute fucking nonsense, and boil down to “just do what Chrome does because nobody can stop them”.
To be fair to Chrome.
Microsoft had the vast majority with Trident. Mozilla/Firefox slowly gained market share with Gecko. Chrome/Webkit* then took market share from both.
It’s not like Chrome just appeared one day and demanded everyone use them, they gained market share by being a good browser.
*(Chrome now uses a fork of Webkit called Blink.)
That being said I do think Firefox provides the best browser experience, and Chrome users should look into switching.
Which is a long way of saying Microsoft fucked up bad. Real bad.
Yeah, like Nokia-bad. Wait…
Microsoft is the king of blowing a massive, industry-defining market lead in the fourth quarter due to unforced errors. Especially in the 21st century:
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They were the default office suite, to the point where their trademark became the category name, and they even had SharePoint; but their stubborn refusal to get into the cloud document game handed off the top spot to Google Docs.
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They were the king of K12 education by default, since Apple was so expensive and essentially the only factor that matters in K12 is price. Then they completely ignored Google offering really good deals on Chromebooks for a decade or more, and now Chrome OS is the dominant K12 platform.
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They owned Skype, which was genericized as the popular verb meaning “to make a video call.” But they ignored the opportunity that was the pandemic, and Zoom not only ate their lunch but took the genericized trademark crown.
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They had Lync, which was the de facto messaging app that every Enterprise deployment used. But then they didn’t update the app for a decade except to change the name to Skype for Business and then to Teams, while Slack ate their lunch.
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And, as you mentioned, they had the top browser for both users and developers, but did nothing with it until Chrome got unattainably faster, easier to use, and more standards-compliant.
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Xbox was never the singular market leader like these other things—they’ve always played ping-pong with PlayStation—but Microsoft owns Rare, an industry defining studio, and they’ve completely wasted them for years.
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They never had dominance in the smartphone world, but they were poised for it with a well-liked and visually distinct platform in Windows Phone which they just abandoned.
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To a certain extent, they had a sort of “goodwill dominance” in their operating system, which they frittered away on automatic updates and design overhauls and (more recently) AI that nobody was asking for.
They lost all these massive leads while they were chasing dominance in search, or video game livestreaming, or AI, or whatever. They always seem to be focusing on the thing that doesn’t matter while their dominance just flutters away in the wind.
It’s in their DNA. They completely missed the internet boat when it first took off in the early 2000s and played catch-up for years thereafter. You would think they would have learned and not made the same mistakes again that you have in your list, but nope. Maybe they were too busy fighting Linux.
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I feel like I’m going crazy since we kept preaching for years that this is the end goal and that this is what will happen with Google’s anti-competitive practices. Just get shit on in the comment threads until recently.
It’s not even a feel good I told you so because this just sucks.
Sigh. Every fucking thread.
This is not true. Firefox is not the only browser that’s not based on Webkit.
There’s Iceweasel, Waterfox, Pale Moon, Seamonkey and Librewolf. That they have a negligible portion of the market is one thing. But they’re on the market, dammit!
I’ve heard this over and over…
But people still aren’t getting it (despite increasingly obvious signs this is already causing problems that will soon get much worse), so I guess we need to keep saying it
on the bright side, with the more obvious signs, more people might listen
I definitely get less sneers these days when I talk about things like this
Hell, you know what - I’m going to double down on your bright side - if the enshitification wasn’t so public and rapid, it might’ve been too late before normal people started noticing
I just had to install chrome to book plane tickets. Kept getting an error on Firefox.
There’s a new feature inside Firefox that allows you to report webpages that are broken on Firefox but work in other browsers. Please use it. It’s a great way to push for universal compatibility within browsers. It’s usually the webpage developer’s fault for using a non-orthodox technique that works exclusively on Chrome, but shouldn’t be done for any sort of reasons, like compliance with web standards. But, it’s possible for Firefox to derive intelligence from the reports and write workarounds.
All the more reason to get more people to use it.
Try changing your user agent. What’s the error?
When I was choosing a return site it kept saying, “oops there was a mistake. It was not your fault. Try again later”.
Their mobile app sucked too, so I installed chrome to see if it would work and it did right away.
If websites don’t work on Firefox even if the user agent was changed to Chrome I recommend you to use a privacy preserving browser like ungoogled chromium.
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Bit hard to do that with government websites and stuff like that.
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How would I change the user agent? Never heard of this before, what is it?
It’s a string that your browser sends to websites with information about the browser itself and your OS. Sometimes that info will be used to block functionality.
Years ago I tried to use TurboTax from Firefox on Ubuntu. It wouldn’t work because only Internet Explorer on Windows was supported. I changed the user agent to make it appear as though I was using a supported setup, and it worked flawlessly.
I haven’t actually needed to use one in a long time, but an extension search for “user agent switcher” should turn up something that can do it.
Easiest would be to install a plugin such as “User-Agent Switcher.” This is the string of text that identifies what browser, version, and platform you’re running to the server you’re accessing.
This is the way I do it when necessary.
Thanks! I just downloaded chrome to use for this one off instance. I’m pretty degoogled, but needed to book a flight so I just needed to get it done.
The one time I have to use Chrome is T-Mobile’s site for some reason
Thai Airways by any chance? I kept getting weird errors in ff but was ok I’m chrome.
Posting this on Lemmy is preaching to the choir.
have any instance admins ever shared the browser stats?
Well, me :) right here : https://analytics.kawa.zip/reddeet.com
14% ain’t bad i suppose. and some FF users may be masking, and your sample size of 12 may not be very representative
Yeah it’s a very small instance, I’m the only one really using it right now ^^’
If it is 12%, that’s still much higher than the internet as a whole which is only 2-3%
need a bigger sample size really. 14% of reddeet.coms 12 active users is 1 person
Hi. I’m on lemmy. I haven’t switched. Why? Because there an insane amount of incorporation into Google. Email, my phone communicating to pc, passwords, auto fill, saved cookies, credit cards.
I want to switch. I want to get off chrome from what I’ve been reading regarding it’s practices. But I’m so engraved and the undertaking of switching is not something I’ve committed to yet. Or might never. I already have a Google Home in my kitchen. I feel like privacy isn’t something I have a privilege of anymore.
They’ve got me.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
Firefox makes it easy to import all that stuff
Huh. Wow. And it has mobile to pc incorporation?
If you mean it syncs to mobile, yes
Honestly for me it has much better synching. It took a little work to move everything over, but far less than I anticipated.
My Firefox experience is seamless between my work station, laptop and Android phone. Syncing happens immediately when I open my session on either of them. I don’t use the Google ecosystem much though (I mean Google pay, etc) so transitioning may be harder than I imagine from where I sit
Man I don’t really use anything Google except my Gmail when logging into misc accounts
You store your passwords on Chome?
Yes 😢
Oh man! Download KeePassXC, put your passwords on there, install the browser extension to use it in your browsers. You can back it up any way you want, including using Google Drive because the file is encrypted.
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Some people don’t want to sign up to a cloud provider or manage their own instance. KeePassXC offers a simple file that can be stored on your devices. It’s easy to sync using your existing cloud accounts and encrypted.
The overlap of the community that don’t want to sign up to cloud providers and those that save their passwords to chrome is a very small overlap.
Poco a poco, little by little. Jumping into the deepend is not for everyone
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The article mentions that “Chrome [has a] more restrictive Manifest 3 plugin API”, but doesn’t go into any examples, when this one is the main one (and why Google brought in manifest v3 at all).
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It should also be mentioned that even compared to Manifest v2, Firefox’s extension API is already more powerful and makes uBlock Origin more effective: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
There’s like… no downside: all upside.
Edit: I exaggerated, of course. Below this are some downsides that individuals have experienced. But personally, my experience using Firefox on desktop for Mac has been all upside. If everybody who can just tries it out, you might be surprised at how friction-free the change is.
Not strictly true. Firefox gets inferior support from cloud services, like Microsoft. Newer versions of their Web apps are not available on Firefox.
But there should be no downside. It’s all artificial.
The big services purposely degrade their sites when users connect with Firefox. It’s well documented.
Unfortunately nothing is being done about it so far.
One thing I miss in Firefox is tab grouping. Yes there are 3rd party extensions that do that. But Chromium based browsers support that natively.
Sideberry is leaps and bounds better at it imo tho
Yeah, this extension is crazy good. It works as if it was native.
Agreed, and it seems like Firefox has recently made an effort to accommodate the extension more, as it seems to run even better than it used to and is now a recommended extension
Oh hell yeah… Thank you friend. I immediately downloaded it, and it took me all of 30 seconds to realize this is it
This is what I’ve been looking for, for years now. I even took a crack at it myself several years ago, but then I realized it wasn’t possible without doing an extension (rather than a plug-in) if I wanted to do it right
You have mitigated one of most inconvenient recurring problems in my life. I’m working on a lemmy app right now, and I’m so grateful I’m going to move up the “mark user as friend” feature.
How would you like me to guild your username so I might recognize you in the future? Lit up border? Tiny crown on your avatar? A little lemmy gold symbol next to the score? I’m open to suggestion
You haven’t tried Vivaldi then. It has the best tab management features of any browser by leaps and bounds, it saddens me they chose Chromium over Gecko given that manifest v3 is coming.
I don’t like that Vivaldi can’t have multiple levels of grouping like you can in sideberry or tree style tabs
I guess that’s the one feature Sideberry has over Vivaldi, but I’ve never missed it if I’m being honest. To each their own.
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It gives me anxiety, it’s way too overcrowded and cluttered. I use Tree Style Tab. It does one thing, it does it well, it doesn’t overcomplicate it, it works with me.
I will say it took me some time to get used to it, but it also is a lot easier to use than it used to, they made a lot of things better in the last update
I think it’s one of those things that you have to sit down and test out and really figure out. Tree style tabs are also good though. I definitely think it’s where sideberry got their inspiration
No, in my experience especially the Android version of Firefox is less smooth when playing animations or scrolling on older or lower end devices.
I really hope with the new Focus on Firefox mobile, that they will iron that out.
Use Fennec instead, no issues on Android
I have to use Chrome for…
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Logging into PSN, since something in Firefox hard locks when I try it. I think it’s to do with Firefox’s password manager.
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VR porn.
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Some videos. Firefox doesn’t support certain video types (namely HEVC/H.265) due to patent issues.
Why wont VR porn work anywhere else?
Firefox doesn’t appear to support it. Chrome does.
At least on this site.
I think it’s to do with WebXR support, but I’m not digging through 10 layers of bullshit JS to find out for certain.
Fair enough :)
Hm, I tried the site and the lady was getting rammed for me in Firefox 123 in Windows.
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Just need one reason: Google.
I feel like anyone on Lemmy who isnt yet using Firefox is the kind of person who isnt going switch now because an article told them they should
edit: it seems I had a stroke (not seriously) while writing this message, and have since edited it so it makes sense
I wish the password autofill feature was more robust for Firefox on Android. Using it as my default password provider but it regularly does not pick up on password fields.
Dunno if this helps you at all, but I’ve been using BitWarden to manage my passwords since I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox (both on PC and my Android phone). It doesn’t fill passwords automatically in either case, but it’s not much extra work to invoke BitWarden to fill those fields as-needed on either device, and it works very consistently. It’s also (I’m told) much more secure. Just thought I’d share that here!
BitWarden is adding autofill!
So, I’ve been using Bitwarden as an autofill service in Android and that works just as well I feel. Atleast for login details.
Personally I prefer ctrl + l
I’ve had this happen with obscure government sites that look like they were made in the 90s, I manually add the login & password for these
For Android users, there’s also the Firefox-based Mull.
I prefer Fennec, Mull is too restrictive. I get the appeal, but I want some of the comforts.
Such as?
My biggest pet peeve is the system color scheme detection. Mull always runs websites in white.
Ah. That’s part of Resist Fingerprinting mode, which (after checking about:config) I see Mull enables by default. Desktop Firefox does the same thing in that mode. You could always turn it off if you don’t value that protection.
You guys switched away from Firefox?
Switched away to Vivaldi and Opera on desktop years ago due to better design and ability to swap between workspaces. Trying to migrate back to Firefox for ethical reasons. Desktop design still lags behind but privacy is great.
Years ago Firefox had a massive memory leak that would wind up crashing FX randomly or just crushing your system resources. The bug persisted for years. and I swirched to Chrome to get away from that poor experience. A few years back, a random community contributer, that was also fed up, dug in and fixed several issues responsible for the leaks. I remeber thinking that I should give FX a go again, but didn’t until relatively recently.
Been with the fox since before the quantum update. I never realized it was as obscure as it apparently is.
It wasn’t, popularity waned slowly over the years.
TAB GROUPS, FIREFOX, BRING BACK TAB GROUPS.
And no, extensions aren’t helping, their UX is so much worse.
That’s just a make or break feature for me.
I would love tab groups
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So I tried to find what tab groups are but most of the results are feature request threads so apologies if this isn’t what you want.
Waterfox will soon be adding some sort of tab grouping feature akin to what tree-style-tab extension does. Here’s the blogpost about it https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-x-treestyletab/
Again I’m not sure if that type of grouping is what you’re looking for but if it is consider watching out for the feature release. Longtime waterfox user and haven’t had many complaints, Alex has quickly responded to the two issues I made in the github including a feature request that got added within a week (ability to unload tabs with right click).
Not OP, but this is one of my long-time desires too. I’m pretty sure they mean Tab Groups implemented in the way Chrome does natively. Currently no extension on Firefox can do it on the tab bar because no extension can modify the tab bar.
When I right click on a tab in Firefox, I can reopen it in a container. The containers (at first glance) seem to be limited to Personal, Work, Banking, Shopping, and Facebook (which is probably there because I have Facebook container installed). In settings I can modify the container tabs available. (And turn the feature on or off, but it’s already on because of Facebook container.)
Is that what that is? It looks a lot like the example you linked. Firefox 123.0, but it’s been there for quite a while.
Not really, though the functionalities are adjacent and I could see how one would make that mistake. I do indeed use container tabs, and they’re a killer feature.
Tab groups are merely organizational, allowing you to reference, store, close, and save groups of tabs en masse; by contrast, container tabs don’t do ANY organization at all; you can’t group them all together, move them all to a new window as one, bookmark them all, close them all, etc.
Interesting, thanks. Seems like the containers could be expanded into the tab group functionality without too much trouble.
True, and I would love the ability to link them, but I think having them linked by default would be confusing to users who don’t need containerization. “Wait, I already logged in to that!”
Yes, albeit like Vivaldi/Arc.
Does anyone have any experience with Firefox on Android?
It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.
Firefox on Android is fine, except they insist upon disabling about:config on the main branch of the browser for some damn stupid reason. You have to use a nightly or beta build to be trusted with your own config that much.
Personally, I ended up switching to the Fennec fork over this.
Yeah, it’s alright.
You can install an ad blocker in it, so it’s automatically better than Chrome.
With that and a few cookie popup removers, it’s almost like the web is usable again.
with ublock origin plugin, it’s amazing
Firefox on Android is great. I migrated that first before I actually migrated back to Firefox on desktop.
Using use daily. Only problem I sometimes have is the inability to upload images, so I just use duckduckgo’s browser
Its ok but I regularly have to swipe the app away and re open it when it displays a blano screen instead of the website.
Yes. It used to suck, say, 10 years ago. My baseline was Youtube and Reddit (back then, okay?) Could I watch Youtube videos the same way as with Chrome or Android browser? No? Then, not ready. Did i.reddit.com open fine? No? Not ready.
Then it happened. And I switched and it has been wonderful ever since.
The only thing that I miss is the “pull down page to reload” gesture. Not sure why Firefox hasn’t implemented that yet. Patents? And also, when a video is in an iframe, it won’t respect the “block autoplay” feature. The rest is dandy.
Settings > customize. Pull to refresh is there
I don’t really visit reddit anymore, but still end up there sometimes because of a google search. Anyway there is an extension for Firefox Android to always show old Reddit. So you don’t have to log in or install the app.
You can enable the refresh gesture in the settings in Firefox
For me it is great on a smartphone but pretty underwhelming on my android tablet. It doesn’t scale websites properly on the larger screen and doesn’t support a tab list on top anymore (like Firefox on desktops).
It is my default. I use ublock and Dark Background Light Text extensions. And the reader view is better than any chromium phone browser.
Works mostly great. Addons like uBlock Origin and Super Agent (auto reject all cookies) is great for your mobile experience.
I noticed Youtube site sometimes has weird framerates. But since Google removed premium lite subscription, I refuse to use the Youtube app and just view with uBlock in browser, even with the framerate issues.
I recently made the switch. Make sure to install whatever add-ons you need, turn on the “open links in apps” setting, and turn on the “pull to refresh” setting. Import your bookmarks and you can still use the Android password manager. It’s not 100% as smooth, but it’s pretty close.
The main problems I have with it now are sometimes there are still issues with loading between browser and apps. Like it might open multiple tabs trying to open an app, and it leaves the app redirect pages open in your tabs list. Additionally, sometimes (like 3% of the time) website scaling doesn’t always work, especially on older sites or those made with janky CMS’s, and I’ve also rarely had problems with some dynamic content like inline forms and graphs.
I am, sometimes there is an issue with videos in Fullscreen, where the video plays just somewhere to the top and off screen, besides that it’s fine.
It’s great but they are two, reported, bugs that annoy me.
First, it sometimes gets stuck half way between dark and light mode.
Second, sometimes it gets stuck starting to load a page. The webciew gets stuck but not the chrome. If you switch tabs the same page will appear. If you enter a new page it will never load. A force close fixes it but it’s annoying.
Using beta is imperative since it enables add-ons . However the bugs are also in stable.
Anybody else having flaky behavior with youtube videos in Firefox lately? Like, only audio resuming but video freezing after rewinding? I’m wondering if this is intentional on the part of Google.
Given Google and YouTube’s history of intentionally and maliciously disrupting other browsers that aren’t chrome, it’ll be a safe bet that it’s intentional.
So, the solution is to disable the adblocker? Not gonna happen
I think youtube makes itself terrible if you don’t have premium. I have the problems you describe and others on both my desktop with FF or my chromebook with chrome.
Nope, it’s still just as terrible with premium.
Yes, but I’ve had it across multiple sites that play video, so I don’t think it’s youtube.
On my pc with a couple ad blockers youtube is SLOW.
If i turn them off it runs fine.
On my android using adaway I have zero youtube lag.
So yeah. Seems pretty intentional
I’ve heard this but it hasn’t happened to me.
On mobile I only use New Pipe for videos. Admittedly, I don’t do much YouTube but I haven’t noticed any problems on my laptop.
Firefox Multiaccount Containers, the thing that can’t be beat by even the best chrome derivatives
@L4s
Fully agree, but @howtogeek.com please enhance your privacy with reducing your dependency to third party scripts.10 reasons:
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- I always used Firefox
- Google can suck my saggy man tits
