21 ms·

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming pri

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

mixedCase 6y ago
Firefox's performance on Linux is markedly worse than Chrome's.
- 8192kjshad09- 6y ago
  How ironic
- rpdillon 6y ago
  This has never been my experience, FWIW.
- washadjeffmad 6y ago
  You may need to manually tune your configs. Often, people just forget to enable HW acceleration. Personally, Chromium crashes too often to rely on it.
drannex 6y ago
Agreed, I haven't seen or heard anything off kilter with Firefox in a very very long time and they have always been on the forefront of privacy and development features.
- toyg 6y ago
  Mozilla make their fair share of fuckups and bad moves, but they're still on a different level from these niche Chromium derivatives that invariably come with ugly business models attached.
- ethagnawl 6y ago
  Well, there was the DNS-over-HTTPS thing and the Mr. Robot thing, and the Pocket thing and ... they're not perfect. However, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for about five years and have been very happy with it -- especially post Quantum. I can't even remember the last time I've had to switch to Chromium because something wasn't working.
  - drannex 6y ago
    I am personally a fan of the DNS-Over-HTTPS experiment,I think it has a lot of benefits and hope it becomes standard. The pocket thing isn't that bad, it's legitimately just a free cloud sync bookmarking service that you can use, or not. It's basically an extension of FF Sync, and no one has problems with that. The Mr Robot plugin catastrophe was abhorrent, I certainly won't deny that.
alexruf 6y ago
Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.
- tygrak 6y ago
  I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise. You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users. But it took quantum to get users back.
    - meerita 6y ago
      Yes, my experience resumes like this: breakthrough browser, adoption, bloating experience, adopt next fast breakthrough browser.
  - dmantis 6y ago
    First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive. Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
    - moooo99 6y ago
      I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.
Sevaris 6y ago
I'm quite happy with FF on desktops, but the mobile version is just ... overall a miserable experience compared to Brave. After using it for a while, going back to FF constantly makes me feel like useful QoL features are missing and I end up going back to Brave.
- drannex 6y ago
  If you have Android try the new Firefox Preview, best browser I've used on mobile so far. Complete rewrite.
  - Sevaris 6y ago
    Which is missing nearly all of the addons that I use and which don't seem to be a priority for Mozilla. Their whole strategy regarding addons is incredibly frustrating.
    - neiman 6y ago
      True dat. Personalization is super important (in any software), it's a shame that in general, it's not being the focus of most of them.
    - drannex 6y ago
      They are opening it up, just taking time as they are developing the appropriate API points. This is a complete rewrite, going to take awhile before all the same API is available. They have opened some major addons as they are tested and stable.
    - jorams 6y ago
      I agree that the lack of full support for add-ons is frustrating, but the alternative you end up going back to, Brave, doesn't (seem to) support add-ons at all. How is that better?
      - Sevaris 6y ago
        Because using Firefox nightly would signal to Mozilla that I'm fine with how they're handling add-ons. If they're not going to support add-ons properly, I'm not going to use their browser.
doc_gunthrop 6y ago
With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers. So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services. If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates.
- SSLy 6y ago
  Somehow Samsung Internet and Vivaldi, both closed-source chromium skins available on the Play Store, have always sparked more trust in me than the seemingly open Brave ever did.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Because they don't have convoluted policies. You get what a user might expect rather than a bunch of rigamarole.
- ifdefdebug 6y ago
  > So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Nope. When something doesnt work in my FF then good bye. I cant be bothered to do extra work like switching browsers for to support their incompetence. It'been rare though.
  - cerberusss 6y ago
    Very rarely, I fall back to Safari because I'm on Mac. But on my laptop, I don't have anything installed from Google. It's just not necessary.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    I'm the same way unless it's a company site. I even changed banks when they "upgraded" their site and it was no longer FF compatible. I figured if they couldn't stick to web standards they might not stick to security standards either. Sometimes I will change the user agent to chrome though in emergency situations and that sometimes fixes things.
slipheen 6y ago
Are use Firefox for my primary browser, but there are certain sites (made by google primarily) which work much better in chromium based browsers. Whether Google is intentionally degrading their performance in Firefox or simply doesn't care is an interesting technical detail, but from a practical standpoint I need to use these sites for my job, so I also need to keep a chromium-based browser around.
- meerita 6y ago
  True, but unless you are a heavy Google user I don't see a cap in my performance to work with, GMail for example from time to time or using Drive, etc.
  - hendersoon 6y ago
    The Google Voice desktop site performs remarkably poorly on Firefox, often locking up entirely.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      The Google voice desktop site is a piece of crap on chrome too... Though I totally believe it's way worse on Firefox.
    - meerita 6y ago
      If you need to use it heavily, then yes. But I don't. I think Firefox performs optimaly 99% times for everyone. There will be a point where you may switch to Chrome, or Safari, but just for specific things unless that specific is the most important one.
echelon 6y ago
Firefox on Android has a much poorer UX than Brave, which is the only thing that keeps me from using it. Pull to reload, tab accessibility, and other performance and rendering oddities need to be fixed before I switch back. I'm happy with Firefox on Linux though.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Do you find that there are irritating glitches? A lot of the web doesn't officially support Firefox anymore (Groupon, Airbnb, my organization).
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  A year or so ago, I occasionally found weird breakages on sites. Haven't in a while, though. The one thing I recommend when switching is installing a user agent switcher for the browser, so it presents as chrome, and websites don't throw a fit at you for using a different browser.
StillBored 6y ago
Try running firefox on a a53 based phone. Its miserable, you can't quite see how badly optimized it is on a high end phone because the page load time is 1/4 second instead of 1/10 of a second. On a low end phone that becomes 2-3 seconds rather than 1/2 a second.
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  I have a Moto X4. At the moment it is sitting around 150USD new. It's got a snapdragon 630 in it and despite struggling on several other applications, Firefox is super snappy and far faster than any other browser I've tried using despite having several add-ons installed.
- livre 6y ago
  Firefox Preview runs much better on low end phones than regular Firefox if you don't mind occasional crashes after certain updates.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I only use them at work, where I have no expectation of privacy, and our SSO occasionally has issues with FF. At home? FF all the way, plus the usual bevy of ad blockers and PiHole.
fastball 6y ago
I've found that any JS-heavy sites works much better in Chrome than FF.
Ayesh 6y ago
I'm all in Firefox too, but Brave is not just a Chrome privacy thing. Brave goes out of its way to make money by ripping off publishers. As a publisher myself, I respect ad blockers. If they block ads, they aren't gonna click the ads in the first place, so it's their choice. I even respect DNT header and not put my pixel tracking for the users. Brave, on the other hand, is doing these sneaky stuff to earn from my efforts. A site that has Alexa rank hovering 10,000 accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads.
- anonymousDan 6y ago
  Maybe this is just a function of how few users Brave has :)
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I always whitelist places that I actually use. Turn off pihole and adblockers for those sites in FF
- basch 6y ago
  >accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads. Thats not how it works. The user receives BAT for opting into OS notification tray ads. Then the user is tipping your blog with their earnings. It may be somewhat of a moot argument, but there is a distinction. The user is accumulating BAT from having the browser open, not necessarily when they are on your site.
burtonator 6y ago
Firefox is STILL largely funded by Google right? I find it odd that one of Firefox's only features, over Chrome, is privacy, but they're funded by Google who is the anti-hero right now in the privacy space. If Firefox's mission is successful they would lose all their funding.
- hendersoon 6y ago
  Mozilla is indirectly funded by Google, yes. They don't have ownership. It's the same way that the NY Times is indirectly funded by Mazda. They pay for ads.
  - bioipbiop 6y ago
    So that’s why Paul Krugman’s latest article was making the point that Jerome Powell’s handling of monetary policy pales in comparison to the handling found in a Mazda CX-5!
  - paulcarroty 6y ago
    Mozilla is funded by Google and also sends user data to Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html
    - cerberusss 6y ago
      It would inform people better if you would be more precise here. According to the links, the "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate visitor statistics. Furthermore they note that they negotiated a special contract with Google to only collect a subset of data.
      - paulcarroty 6y ago
        I don't believe any kind of personal or special contracts/negotiations/etc will deny Google to track analytics.google.com connection logs. So, "private browser" and Google servers aren't compatible by design.
hendersoon 6y ago
As of last year, Firefox pinged telemetry every time you visit certain targeted sites, controlled by the "Recommend extensions as you browse" feature. They may actually still do this. In 2018, Mozilla surreptitiously installed a mysterious plugin named Looking Glass to every installed browser as part of a marketing deal with the Mr. Robot TV show. Thus plugin altered websites for an alternate reality game promoting the show. Back in 2017 Firefox Focus, one of their iOS efforts marketed as being about user privacy, collected telemetry and sent it to Adjust GMBH, a tracking/analytics company based in Germany. Also in 2017 Firefox integrated a Cliqz plugin to recommend content in the searchbar based on your browsing history, which was sent to the Cliqz servers and theoretically anonymized. Cliqz GMBH is another German company involved in analytics/tracking, and a notoriously scummy one to boot. I mean, I could go on. Mozilla's hands ain't clean, they make mistakes, but at least their _manifesto_ is worthy.
augusto-moura 6y ago
Well much of Firefox was done by Brendan Eich, he is a founder of both Mozilla and Brave
techntoke 6y ago
Firefox enables just as much telemetry as Chrome. Fortunately they provide policy options to disable them, but they are enabled by default. Chrome and Chromium also has an equal amount of policies that can be disable to better protect privacy. Chromium was never intentionally limiting any APIs to prevent ad-blockers. I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion, although I get some of the frustration, especially when their main stream of revenue is advertising. I personally don't use Firefox because it doesn't work as well on modern Linux. Chromium supports Wayland much better. I get weird artifacts on Firefox when running in Sway on Wayland, especially when switching between full-screen and split. Additionally, I still don't believe Firefox properly handles video hardware acceleration and Chromium does on my distro using the native package manager. Both browsers could benefit from separating their solutions into open source protocols, for example bookmarks, password, and other sync services. This way syncing is done at file-system level like gopass-bridge and Browserpass. GPGme already has an app called gpgme-json for app integration. That way people can use Syncthing, Nextcloud, or whatever preferred cloud-sync solution. I know Firefox has tried building it's own password manager into Firefox, and Chromium has half-assed this as well, but the tools are already there they could just adopt and would provide a much safer and better overall experience. These platforms and engineers should feel a duty to innovate—not for the sake of a paycheck, company directive, or personal enrichment—but for the community to have a piece of software that is a message of freedom. When they send URLs to remote services by default for safe search, network prediction, etc. they aren't free. When they implement their own centralized sync solution, but make it difficult for you to implement a decentralized or locally-hosted sync solution, then they aren't free. When advertisers are able to use supported JavaScript to port scan your computer, track every pixel movement, and track you around the web; then the software isn't free and neither are you.
catalogia 6y ago
As a long-time Firefox user, I find the constant drama over Brave rather amusing. It seems to be an intersection of internet publishers upset about Brave's ad blocking/replacing, people who hate Eich for his politics/beliefs, and cryptocurrency critics. It's a perfect storm of drama, centered around a browser that has a very small market share from what I can tell (otherwise I'd probably find it all less amusing.)
Markoff 6y ago
because one version of Firefox on Android is extremely slow and the other one faster is extremely buggy? for the record I use Firefox on desktop, but all their versions on Android are unusable, so I use Kiwi browser waiting for some updated browser with extensions, ungoogled chromium doesn't really work and yandex is shady pretty much nobody use brave on desktop

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

mixedCase 6y ago

Firefox's performance on Linux is markedly worse than Chrome's.

8192kjshad09- 6y ago
How ironic
rpdillon 6y ago
This has never been my experience, FWIW.
washadjeffmad 6y ago
You may need to manually tune your configs. Often, people just forget to enable HW acceleration. Personally, Chromium crashes too often to rely on it.

drannex 6y ago

Agreed, I haven't seen or heard anything off kilter with Firefox in a very very long time and they have always been on the forefront of privacy and development features.

toyg 6y ago
Mozilla make their fair share of fuckups and bad moves, but they're still on a different level from these niche Chromium derivatives that invariably come with ugly business models attached.
ethagnawl 6y ago
Well, there was the DNS-over-HTTPS thing and the Mr. Robot thing, and the Pocket thing and ... they're not perfect. However, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for about five years and have been very happy with it -- especially post Quantum. I can't even remember the last time I've had to switch to Chromium because something wasn't working.
- drannex 6y ago
  I am personally a fan of the DNS-Over-HTTPS experiment,I think it has a lot of benefits and hope it becomes standard. The pocket thing isn't that bad, it's legitimately just a free cloud sync bookmarking service that you can use, or not. It's basically an extension of FF Sync, and no one has problems with that. The Mr Robot plugin catastrophe was abhorrent, I certainly won't deny that.

alexruf 6y ago

Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.

tygrak 6y ago
I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?
- waheoo 6y ago
  Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise. You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users. But it took quantum to get users back.
  - meerita 6y ago
    Yes, my experience resumes like this: breakthrough browser, adoption, bloating experience, adopt next fast breakthrough browser.
- dmantis 6y ago
  First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive. Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
  - moooo99 6y ago
    I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.

Sevaris 6y ago

I'm quite happy with FF on desktops, but the mobile version is just ... overall a miserable experience compared to Brave. After using it for a while, going back to FF constantly makes me feel like useful QoL features are missing and I end up going back to Brave.

drannex 6y ago
If you have Android try the new Firefox Preview, best browser I've used on mobile so far. Complete rewrite.
- Sevaris 6y ago
  Which is missing nearly all of the addons that I use and which don't seem to be a priority for Mozilla. Their whole strategy regarding addons is incredibly frustrating.
  - neiman 6y ago
    True dat. Personalization is super important (in any software), it's a shame that in general, it's not being the focus of most of them.
  - drannex 6y ago
    They are opening it up, just taking time as they are developing the appropriate API points. This is a complete rewrite, going to take awhile before all the same API is available. They have opened some major addons as they are tested and stable.
  - jorams 6y ago
    I agree that the lack of full support for add-ons is frustrating, but the alternative you end up going back to, Brave, doesn't (seem to) support add-ons at all. How is that better?
    - Sevaris 6y ago
      Because using Firefox nightly would signal to Mozilla that I'm fine with how they're handling add-ons. If they're not going to support add-ons properly, I'm not going to use their browser.

doc_gunthrop 6y ago

With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers. So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services. If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates.

SSLy 6y ago
Somehow Samsung Internet and Vivaldi, both closed-source chromium skins available on the Play Store, have always sparked more trust in me than the seemingly open Brave ever did.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Because they don't have convoluted policies. You get what a user might expect rather than a bunch of rigamarole.
ifdefdebug 6y ago
> So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Nope. When something doesnt work in my FF then good bye. I cant be bothered to do extra work like switching browsers for to support their incompetence. It'been rare though.
- cerberusss 6y ago
  Very rarely, I fall back to Safari because I'm on Mac. But on my laptop, I don't have anything installed from Google. It's just not necessary.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I'm the same way unless it's a company site. I even changed banks when they "upgraded" their site and it was no longer FF compatible. I figured if they couldn't stick to web standards they might not stick to security standards either. Sometimes I will change the user agent to chrome though in emergency situations and that sometimes fixes things.

slipheen 6y ago

Are use Firefox for my primary browser, but there are certain sites (made by google primarily) which work much better in chromium based browsers. Whether Google is intentionally degrading their performance in Firefox or simply doesn't care is an interesting technical detail, but from a practical standpoint I need to use these sites for my job, so I also need to keep a chromium-based browser around.

meerita 6y ago
True, but unless you are a heavy Google user I don't see a cap in my performance to work with, GMail for example from time to time or using Drive, etc.
- hendersoon 6y ago
  The Google Voice desktop site performs remarkably poorly on Firefox, often locking up entirely.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    The Google voice desktop site is a piece of crap on chrome too... Though I totally believe it's way worse on Firefox.
  - meerita 6y ago
    If you need to use it heavily, then yes. But I don't. I think Firefox performs optimaly 99% times for everyone. There will be a point where you may switch to Chrome, or Safari, but just for specific things unless that specific is the most important one.

echelon 6y ago

Firefox on Android has a much poorer UX than Brave, which is the only thing that keeps me from using it. Pull to reload, tab accessibility, and other performance and rendering oddities need to be fixed before I switch back. I'm happy with Firefox on Linux though.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Do you find that there are irritating glitches? A lot of the web doesn't officially support Firefox anymore (Groupon, Airbnb, my organization).

crocodiletears 6y ago
A year or so ago, I occasionally found weird breakages on sites. Haven't in a while, though. The one thing I recommend when switching is installing a user agent switcher for the browser, so it presents as chrome, and websites don't throw a fit at you for using a different browser.

StillBored 6y ago

Try running firefox on a a53 based phone. Its miserable, you can't quite see how badly optimized it is on a high end phone because the page load time is 1/4 second instead of 1/10 of a second. On a low end phone that becomes 2-3 seconds rather than 1/2 a second.

jacoblambda 6y ago
I have a Moto X4. At the moment it is sitting around 150USD new. It's got a snapdragon 630 in it and despite struggling on several other applications, Firefox is super snappy and far faster than any other browser I've tried using despite having several add-ons installed.
livre 6y ago
Firefox Preview runs much better on low end phones than regular Firefox if you don't mind occasional crashes after certain updates.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I only use them at work, where I have no expectation of privacy, and our SSO occasionally has issues with FF. At home? FF all the way, plus the usual bevy of ad blockers and PiHole.

fastball 6y ago

I've found that any JS-heavy sites works much better in Chrome than FF.

Ayesh 6y ago

I'm all in Firefox too, but Brave is not just a Chrome privacy thing. Brave goes out of its way to make money by ripping off publishers. As a publisher myself, I respect ad blockers. If they block ads, they aren't gonna click the ads in the first place, so it's their choice. I even respect DNT header and not put my pixel tracking for the users. Brave, on the other hand, is doing these sneaky stuff to earn from my efforts. A site that has Alexa rank hovering 10,000 accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads.

anonymousDan 6y ago
Maybe this is just a function of how few users Brave has :)
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I always whitelist places that I actually use. Turn off pihole and adblockers for those sites in FF
basch 6y ago
>accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads. Thats not how it works. The user receives BAT for opting into OS notification tray ads. Then the user is tipping your blog with their earnings. It may be somewhat of a moot argument, but there is a distinction. The user is accumulating BAT from having the browser open, not necessarily when they are on your site.

burtonator 6y ago

Firefox is STILL largely funded by Google right? I find it odd that one of Firefox's only features, over Chrome, is privacy, but they're funded by Google who is the anti-hero right now in the privacy space. If Firefox's mission is successful they would lose all their funding.

hendersoon 6y ago
Mozilla is indirectly funded by Google, yes. They don't have ownership. It's the same way that the NY Times is indirectly funded by Mazda. They pay for ads.
- bioipbiop 6y ago
  So that’s why Paul Krugman’s latest article was making the point that Jerome Powell’s handling of monetary policy pales in comparison to the handling found in a Mazda CX-5!
- paulcarroty 6y ago
  Mozilla is funded by Google and also sends user data to Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html
  - cerberusss 6y ago
    It would inform people better if you would be more precise here. According to the links, the "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate visitor statistics. Furthermore they note that they negotiated a special contract with Google to only collect a subset of data.
    - paulcarroty 6y ago
      I don't believe any kind of personal or special contracts/negotiations/etc will deny Google to track analytics.google.com connection logs. So, "private browser" and Google servers aren't compatible by design.

hendersoon 6y ago

As of last year, Firefox pinged telemetry every time you visit certain targeted sites, controlled by the "Recommend extensions as you browse" feature. They may actually still do this. In 2018, Mozilla surreptitiously installed a mysterious plugin named Looking Glass to every installed browser as part of a marketing deal with the Mr. Robot TV show. Thus plugin altered websites for an alternate reality game promoting the show. Back in 2017 Firefox Focus, one of their iOS efforts marketed as being about user privacy, collected telemetry and sent it to Adjust GMBH, a tracking/analytics company based in Germany. Also in 2017 Firefox integrated a Cliqz plugin to recommend content in the searchbar based on your browsing history, which was sent to the Cliqz servers and theoretically anonymized. Cliqz GMBH is another German company involved in analytics/tracking, and a notoriously scummy one to boot. I mean, I could go on. Mozilla's hands ain't clean, they make mistakes, but at least their _manifesto_ is worthy.

augusto-moura 6y ago

Well much of Firefox was done by Brendan Eich, he is a founder of both Mozilla and Brave

techntoke 6y ago

Firefox enables just as much telemetry as Chrome. Fortunately they provide policy options to disable them, but they are enabled by default. Chrome and Chromium also has an equal amount of policies that can be disable to better protect privacy. Chromium was never intentionally limiting any APIs to prevent ad-blockers. I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion, although I get some of the frustration, especially when their main stream of revenue is advertising. I personally don't use Firefox because it doesn't work as well on modern Linux. Chromium supports Wayland much better. I get weird artifacts on Firefox when running in Sway on Wayland, especially when switching between full-screen and split. Additionally, I still don't believe Firefox properly handles video hardware acceleration and Chromium does on my distro using the native package manager. Both browsers could benefit from separating their solutions into open source protocols, for example bookmarks, password, and other sync services. This way syncing is done at file-system level like gopass-bridge and Browserpass. GPGme already has an app called gpgme-json for app integration. That way people can use Syncthing, Nextcloud, or whatever preferred cloud-sync solution. I know Firefox has tried building it's own password manager into Firefox, and Chromium has half-assed this as well, but the tools are already there they could just adopt and would provide a much safer and better overall experience. These platforms and engineers should feel a duty to innovate—not for the sake of a paycheck, company directive, or personal enrichment—but for the community to have a piece of software that is a message of freedom. When they send URLs to remote services by default for safe search, network prediction, etc. they aren't free. When they implement their own centralized sync solution, but make it difficult for you to implement a decentralized or locally-hosted sync solution, then they aren't free. When advertisers are able to use supported JavaScript to port scan your computer, track every pixel movement, and track you around the web; then the software isn't free and neither are you.

catalogia 6y ago

As a long-time Firefox user, I find the constant drama over Brave rather amusing. It seems to be an intersection of internet publishers upset about Brave's ad blocking/replacing, people who hate Eich for his politics/beliefs, and cryptocurrency critics. It's a perfect storm of drama, centered around a browser that has a very small market share from what I can tell (otherwise I'd probably find it all less amusing.)

Markoff 6y ago

because one version of Firefox on Android is extremely slow and the other one faster is extremely buggy? for the record I use Firefox on desktop, but all their versions on Android are unusable, so I use Kiwi browser waiting for some updated browser with extensions, ungoogled chromium doesn't really work and yandex is shady pretty much nobody use brave on desktop