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>Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels a

>Stop using chrome. Honestly, wtf?! Firefox is awesome. I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels as though you have to choose between two options that aren't great, so is there a point in switching? Take the add ons situation. At least on Chrome I can run my own add ons.

brianzelip 7y ago
Yes there is a point to switching. Mozilla is 10000000x more on our side.
- nobleach 7y ago
  From a purely philosophical standpoint, Mozilla has always been the browser of "choice". Its humble beginnings never included "world domination"... and Firefox was an extraordinarily bold attempt to unseat IE. Chrome did a lot of good things in the beginning. It brought web standards to the forefront. The past few years though, the same old tired story has played out. Company gets too much market share, and subsequently believes they should own/police/decide the future of the web. In the case of Google, naturally, their motives for web "ownership/domination" are fiscally motivated. (I'm not saying this is wrong in regard to making money for their shareholders. I am saying that this often is not what's good for their average user) But that's the issue, they never promised they were doing this for "freedom" or any other reason.
  - 40four 7y ago
    >Chrome did a lot of good things in the beginning. It brought web standards to the forefront. To be fair to Google, I think it is important to acknowledge the good things Chrome did in the beginning. I remember when it came out, and most (non - Mac users) were still using IE, it was fantastic! I remember jumping on board immediately. But for me at this point, it has become too much to bear. At this point they are making so much money from tracking users and selling to advertisers.. who could blame them for continuing to do so? I sure can't, haha. But after a while, I started realizing all the intrusive & creepy advertisements I was seeing were simply a result of the browser software I chose, and the website I chose do do my searches on, so I started looking for alternatives.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Yes but Mozilla is lazy, badly managed and dumb. They were too late on mobile, and if it weren't for Chrome, Firefox today would need 64GB of RAM to run.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    I'd rather have someone "dumb" on my side than someone "smart" actively working against me.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    I’ve seen Firefox north of 20gb on my 32gb desktop more than once, and tab crashes are a daily annoyance. Worse, it doesn’t seem appreciably faster on machines with less memory. I wish there was some config flag I could set that would put it on a diet...
    - behringer 7y ago
      Stop hoarding tabs. Anyway I think those are arguments in the past anyway.
      - wizzwizz4 7y ago
        Firefox can cope with tab hoarding pretty well, so long as they're not all pinned or anything and you restart your browser every so often.
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        "In the past"? I can reproduce this on my daily driver today. Why do I need to change my workflow because Firefox got worse at what I've used it for for years? If I have to change the way I work, why not change browsers too? If there's a tab limit beyond which Firefox can't effectively control itself, why is that not a hard coded limit?
        behringer 7y ago
        Ram is cheap: https://www.amazon.com/slp/memory-ram-ddr4/rcnyvqomjbxu8pj https://www.amazon.com/slp/memory-ram-ddr4/rcnyvqomjbxu8pj
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
minikites 7y ago
>I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. And Google hasn't?
- Mirioron 7y ago
  You bring up a good point. I think the reason I feel this way is that Google's screw ups didn't inconvenience my usage of Chrome, whereas Mozilla's have inconvenienced my usage of Firefox. What made me initially switch to Chrome was the UI change in Firefox. Years later I thought of swapping back to Firefox and I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval. This is not and has never been true. What is no longer possible is the ability to sideload extensions outside of the browser by copying files into a directory because that's how dirtbags have stuck extensions that could not be uninstalled into Firefox as part of a third-party app install. Go to `about:addons`, install add-on from file, you're done.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      Are you sure? Because I just created a barebones hello world. It works fine as a temporary add-on, but I can't install it from the file. Says the add-on is corrupted. Then I downloaded a working add-on. It worked fine when installing from file. I removed the signing information. It installs fine as a temporary add-on, but throws the same error as the hello world. I'm pretty sure that the add-ons need to be signed by Mozilla to install from file.
      - commoner 7y ago
        You'll need to use Firefox Developer Edition, Nightly, or ESR. Then, go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false. https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-and-distribution-overview/#signing-your-addons https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-... You can then sideload unsigned add-ons by following these instructions: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribute-sideloading/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribu...
bvda 7y ago
Except if that add on blocks Google's precious ads
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  Ublock/adblock/abp/etc all still works in chrome
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    For now. Aren’t they floating some sort of API change that drastically reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers?
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    I think the larger point is, for how long? If Google keeps restricting ad-blocking even further, maybe they'll drop even more privacy options, and dumb down more APIs. Google/Chrome/<all other services> simply do not have your interests first, so it's a choice between Google and <everyone else (who by default track you less)>.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    And yet only a feature-restricted version of AdBlock will continue to function when they cripple the APIs it relies on: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss... They claim to be doing this for speed purposes, but it'll actually slow down the vast majority of Chrome profiles running ad blockers.
  - sectiondetail 7y ago
    Desktop Chrome, yes. There's a darn good reason why my browser of choice on Android is Firefox, and that reason is spelled "ublock origin".
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I suppose my feeling is that this is the same kind of reductive reasoning behind the "same thing, both sides" mentality of American politics. Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office. Candidate B: Refuses to tip more than 10%, ever. One seems objectively worse than the other, and yet the average voter gets to say, "Oh, well since they're both bad in some way, I can vote for Candidate A with a clear conscience because I like his views on X."
- hgoel 7y ago
  I find it funny that you don't realize that you just did the very thing you're accusing Americans of.
- syshum 7y ago
  That is in no way an objective statement on American politics and the comparison of the 2 party system. The idea that American's issues with the Democratic canidates can be compared as "Refused to tip more on 10%", is moronic. It is more like Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office. Candidate B: Wants to Steal my money and give it to other people, wants to force me in to government contolled substandard health care, wants to take my core freedoms (speech, guns, and propery rights), and was to trash the economy so finding a job is hard
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    It is, however, a fairly good analogy for the Google v.s. Mozilla argument.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    US politics can usually be summarized as the Evil Party versus the Stupid Party, and it isn't always clear which is which. Candidate A: Openly racist and homophobic. Annoyingly pious. Secretly gay. Claimed to no longer have any association with the Klan after the investigative journalist published that one article. Inherited money; pretends to be a farmer/rancher. Leaves teaser religious tracts that look like money in lieu of tips. Candidate B: Policy proposals completely divorced from reality. No primary-sponsored legislation has ever passed. Secretly a roofie-rapist. Does insider trading on privileged information. Incumbent in the safest district in the state. Habitual drunk driver, though never convicted. That's just what you get (eventually) with winner-take-all, first-past-the-post elections. Even in states where the minority party essentially never wins, the party leadership can still be corrupt as Hell, and no decent person can hold their breath long enough to avoid the stench of it.
arkanciscan 7y ago
Brave is a good browser too. You can run your add-ons there.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I actually am using Brave and Chrome. They're similar enough that they more or less feel interchangeable.
  - jtxx 7y ago
    that's cause Brave's running on Chromium
giancarlostoro 7y ago
> I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It kills me that someone would be pissed at Mozilla for adding pocket, Chrome comes with so many damn Google centric plugins, and one little useful utility you can remove is what makes you lose it over Firefox? Come on.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Pocket really isn't the problem. Mozilla only has made bad decisions since 2011 without ever learning from any of their many, many, many mistakes.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    I saw way more outrage over pocket than I should of. Mozilla is a big org. They need to figure out how to generate revenue without botching it up. On the other hand, there are plenty of Mozilla based forks that do their best to respect your privacy.
- syshum 7y ago
  It kills me that you think Pocket is the poor decision everyone is talking about
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    It was one example due to the outrage I saw over when it was added to Firefox OOTB.
tyingq 7y ago
When they made Yahoo! the default search engine I had to stop recommending it to non-tech folks, as I'd also have to explain how to change that. That was quite a while ago, but that kind of thing does stick with you.
DCKing 7y ago
> I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. How come this is brought up in the argument at all? Mozilla is very imperfect, but they're the only major browser vendor that doesn't have their own ad networks. Safari and Firefox are the only two options that 1) are not owned by a company working against browser user's interests or 2) inadvertently end up helping the dominance of a browser in category 1. And most people can't use Safari. Mozilla has actively shown time and time again that they're there for the end user. You can be critical of the times when they made mistakes in that mission (plenty of times), but please realize who your real friends are.

brianzelip 7y ago

Yes there is a point to switching. Mozilla is 10000000x more on our side.

nobleach 7y ago
From a purely philosophical standpoint, Mozilla has always been the browser of "choice". Its humble beginnings never included "world domination"... and Firefox was an extraordinarily bold attempt to unseat IE. Chrome did a lot of good things in the beginning. It brought web standards to the forefront. The past few years though, the same old tired story has played out. Company gets too much market share, and subsequently believes they should own/police/decide the future of the web. In the case of Google, naturally, their motives for web "ownership/domination" are fiscally motivated. (I'm not saying this is wrong in regard to making money for their shareholders. I am saying that this often is not what's good for their average user) But that's the issue, they never promised they were doing this for "freedom" or any other reason.
- 40four 7y ago
  >Chrome did a lot of good things in the beginning. It brought web standards to the forefront. To be fair to Google, I think it is important to acknowledge the good things Chrome did in the beginning. I remember when it came out, and most (non - Mac users) were still using IE, it was fantastic! I remember jumping on board immediately. But for me at this point, it has become too much to bear. At this point they are making so much money from tracking users and selling to advertisers.. who could blame them for continuing to do so? I sure can't, haha. But after a while, I started realizing all the intrusive & creepy advertisements I was seeing were simply a result of the browser software I chose, and the website I chose do do my searches on, so I started looking for alternatives.
Scarbutt 7y ago
Yes but Mozilla is lazy, badly managed and dumb. They were too late on mobile, and if it weren't for Chrome, Firefox today would need 64GB of RAM to run.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  I'd rather have someone "dumb" on my side than someone "smart" actively working against me.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  I’ve seen Firefox north of 20gb on my 32gb desktop more than once, and tab crashes are a daily annoyance. Worse, it doesn’t seem appreciably faster on machines with less memory. I wish there was some config flag I could set that would put it on a diet...
  - behringer 7y ago
    Stop hoarding tabs. Anyway I think those are arguments in the past anyway.
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
      Firefox can cope with tab hoarding pretty well, so long as they're not all pinned or anything and you restart your browser every so often.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      "In the past"? I can reproduce this on my daily driver today. Why do I need to change my workflow because Firefox got worse at what I've used it for for years? If I have to change the way I work, why not change browsers too? If there's a tab limit beyond which Firefox can't effectively control itself, why is that not a hard coded limit?
      - behringer 7y ago
        Ram is cheap: https://www.amazon.com/slp/memory-ram-ddr4/rcnyvqomjbxu8pj https://www.amazon.com/slp/memory-ram-ddr4/rcnyvqomjbxu8pj
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

minikites 7y ago

>I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. And Google hasn't?

Mirioron 7y ago
You bring up a good point. I think the reason I feel this way is that Google's screw ups didn't inconvenience my usage of Chrome, whereas Mozilla's have inconvenienced my usage of Firefox. What made me initially switch to Chrome was the UI change in Firefox. Years later I thought of swapping back to Firefox and I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval.
- eropple 7y ago
  > I found out that Firefox doesn't allow me to run my own add ons without their approval. This is not and has never been true. What is no longer possible is the ability to sideload extensions outside of the browser by copying files into a directory because that's how dirtbags have stuck extensions that could not be uninstalled into Firefox as part of a third-party app install. Go to `about:addons`, install add-on from file, you're done.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    Are you sure? Because I just created a barebones hello world. It works fine as a temporary add-on, but I can't install it from the file. Says the add-on is corrupted. Then I downloaded a working add-on. It worked fine when installing from file. I removed the signing information. It installs fine as a temporary add-on, but throws the same error as the hello world. I'm pretty sure that the add-ons need to be signed by Mozilla to install from file.
    - commoner 7y ago
      You'll need to use Firefox Developer Edition, Nightly, or ESR. Then, go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false. https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-and-distribution-overview/#signing-your-addons https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-... You can then sideload unsigned add-ons by following these instructions: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribute-sideloading/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribu...

bvda 7y ago

Except if that add on blocks Google's precious ads

buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
Ublock/adblock/abp/etc all still works in chrome
- Karunamon 7y ago
  For now. Aren’t they floating some sort of API change that drastically reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers?
- zentiggr 7y ago
  I think the larger point is, for how long? If Google keeps restricting ad-blocking even further, maybe they'll drop even more privacy options, and dumb down more APIs. Google/Chrome/<all other services> simply do not have your interests first, so it's a choice between Google and <everyone else (who by default track you less)>.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  And yet only a feature-restricted version of AdBlock will continue to function when they cripple the APIs it relies on: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss... They claim to be doing this for speed purposes, but it'll actually slow down the vast majority of Chrome profiles running ad blockers.
- sectiondetail 7y ago
  Desktop Chrome, yes. There's a darn good reason why my browser of choice on Android is Firefox, and that reason is spelled "ublock origin".

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

I suppose my feeling is that this is the same kind of reductive reasoning behind the "same thing, both sides" mentality of American politics. Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office. Candidate B: Refuses to tip more than 10%, ever. One seems objectively worse than the other, and yet the average voter gets to say, "Oh, well since they're both bad in some way, I can vote for Candidate A with a clear conscience because I like his views on X."

hgoel 7y ago
I find it funny that you don't realize that you just did the very thing you're accusing Americans of.
syshum 7y ago
That is in no way an objective statement on American politics and the comparison of the 2 party system. The idea that American's issues with the Democratic canidates can be compared as "Refused to tip more on 10%", is moronic. It is more like Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office. Candidate B: Wants to Steal my money and give it to other people, wants to force me in to government contolled substandard health care, wants to take my core freedoms (speech, guns, and propery rights), and was to trash the economy so finding a job is hard
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  It is, however, a fairly good analogy for the Google v.s. Mozilla argument.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  US politics can usually be summarized as the Evil Party versus the Stupid Party, and it isn't always clear which is which. Candidate A: Openly racist and homophobic. Annoyingly pious. Secretly gay. Claimed to no longer have any association with the Klan after the investigative journalist published that one article. Inherited money; pretends to be a farmer/rancher. Leaves teaser religious tracts that look like money in lieu of tips. Candidate B: Policy proposals completely divorced from reality. No primary-sponsored legislation has ever passed. Secretly a roofie-rapist. Does insider trading on privileged information. Incumbent in the safest district in the state. Habitual drunk driver, though never convicted. That's just what you get (eventually) with winner-take-all, first-past-the-post elections. Even in states where the minority party essentially never wins, the party leadership can still be corrupt as Hell, and no decent person can hold their breath long enough to avoid the stench of it.

arkanciscan 7y ago

Brave is a good browser too. You can run your add-ons there.

Mirioron 7y ago
I actually am using Brave and Chrome. They're similar enough that they more or less feel interchangeable.
- jtxx 7y ago
  that's cause Brave's running on Chromium

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It kills me that someone would be pissed at Mozilla for adding pocket, Chrome comes with so many damn Google centric plugins, and one little useful utility you can remove is what makes you lose it over Firefox? Come on.

Kaiyou 7y ago
Pocket really isn't the problem. Mozilla only has made bad decisions since 2011 without ever learning from any of their many, many, many mistakes.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  I saw way more outrage over pocket than I should of. Mozilla is a big org. They need to figure out how to generate revenue without botching it up. On the other hand, there are plenty of Mozilla based forks that do their best to respect your privacy.
syshum 7y ago
It kills me that you think Pocket is the poor decision everyone is talking about
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  It was one example due to the outrage I saw over when it was added to Firefox OOTB.

tyingq 7y ago

When they made Yahoo! the default search engine I had to stop recommending it to non-tech folks, as I'd also have to explain how to change that. That was quite a while ago, but that kind of thing does stick with you.

DCKing 7y ago

> I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. How come this is brought up in the argument at all? Mozilla is very imperfect, but they're the only major browser vendor that doesn't have their own ad networks. Safari and Firefox are the only two options that 1) are not owned by a company working against browser user's interests or 2) inadvertently end up helping the dominance of a browser in category 1. And most people can't use Safari. Mozilla has actively shown time and time again that they're there for the end user. You can be critical of the times when they made mistakes in that mission (plenty of times), but please realize who your real friends are.