Can someone remind me why we stopped using Firefox a while back? There was some piece of news that broke everyone’s trust, but I can’t remember what Mozilla did. Was it a change in their user agreement?
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That was the final straw for me, I switched over to waterfox for nominally more privacy.
I never fully did, but I did end up using Chromium more than I wanted to:
- Some poorly written sites refuse to work with FF. My water company, for example. They eventually fixed it after I complained multiple times. Now they display a warning that it’s “Optimized for Chrome” but no longer flat out prevent FF from logging in (you know, to pay bills and such).
- FF Desktop still doesn’t support PWAs, and their recent update says they’re working on it, but they’re half-assing it (installed web apps will still have the menu bars, address, bar etc). I self-host a lot of web applications and want them to appear like native apps. Hence, Chromium.
- There was some recent ToS / Privacy Policy change, and everyone was knee-jerking “time to abandon Firefox” as if there’s anywhere else to go.
- A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster. That’s been a while, and I think when FF’s “Quantum” update (or whatever it was called) came out in like 2016 or 2017, it put it back on par.
A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster
Performance was huge.
I was willing to put up with a little jank from my browser because I wanted a diverse browser ecosystem, but Chrome felt much, much now performant. After I switched to Chrome, browsing felt noticably better.
A good while back, Chrome was superior. Faster yes, but also more polished and intuitive as browsers go.
Also, Google was “Do no Evil”, and Firefox was good, but not great.
Today, Firefox is still good, and Google is evil.
Times definitely have changed.
Also, Google was “Do no Evil”
At the time Google seemed awesome. Gmail was a game changer - a usable webapp that was better than maybe clients.
Firefox was good, but not great.
Firefox was the best of a bad bunch. It was so easy for devs to move to Chrome because the experience on every other browser was bad.
#2 for me. The PWAs for Firefox extension broke one too many times so I gave up.
Good news - Firefox is actively developing built-in PWA functionality right now. There’s a discussion thread I’ll link you to when I find it.
EDIT - here you go, this also has links to further discussions: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561
There’s already a VERY early version in FF Nightly, but tbh it doesn’t yet really do anything you’d expect of a PWA.
Info on that: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561
No, chrome came out and was that much better than every other browser at first.
Is it though?
It was. It was crazy fast and lightweight at the time.
It gained massive market share.
It became the default development target for websites.
Other browsers started getting left behind.
Each step syphons users from other browsers, compounding issues.
The dev tools in Chrome were a revelation. I think Firefox had something similar (Firebug?) but the Chrome tools seemed better.
I think OP is mostly focusing on why people switched off of FF. Present behaviour isn’t super relevant to the conversation.
Was
Operative word.
When Chrome initially came out? Not even close. Firefox was a bloated piece of crap, Chrome was slim and didn’t have all the bullshit that every other browser had.
Obviously, things have changed a little…
It was too noisy. My wife and I used to live in a small apartment. I’d leave my Linux box on all the time. Running Firefox, it’d periodically spin up the fan, which was loud enough to annoy my wife at night, and me during the day. Chrome didn’t spin up the fan. I switched and we stopped hearing my noisy computer.
This was a while ago. I can’t remember if it was Firefox or Mozilla at that point.
There was some uproar when they essentially de-committed to supporting MDN/developer tools in 2020
…we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team…
The thing is, I never have. Chrome is absolute hot garbage and spyware, all the Chromium forks are all flawed and bugged and still feed into Google’s dominance because of engine and stupid Manifest bullshit. Firefox, despite all the stupid things Mozilla did and still does just works the best and is not Chromium.
Can you elaborate on the manifest bullshit thing?
New Chromium framework for browser extensions that severely limits their functionality. It neuters adlockers.
Google sells it as an updated extension framework to improve security, privacy, and performance of extensions… But it also nerfs adblockers ability to block all ads.
There are some forks from chrome that haven’t implemented the new manifest thing. So if you really need to, look for those.
Here, this should help. tl;dr: Google updated how Chrome security works and it broke apps like every adblocker at the time.
Understood, that’s something to be expected by Google, but complete shit.
However, adblockers still work these days - see Vivaldi, so they found a workaround?
There is no workaround as most browsers download extensions from Google’s extension repository and they don’t allow extensions that don’t follow their bullshit manifest. Ironically, only Opera has its own extensions repository/store that can do that. Others rely on their own built in adblockers.
It didn’t break adblockers “at the time”. It broke them intentionally. That was by design. Google is an advertising company dabbling in other areas. They don’t want a browser that can properly block their primary revenue.
It was intentional to block/break adblockers. Google is worlds largest advertiser…
Honestly, as a “non-power” Firefox user, the only issues I’m experiencing is when Google purposely slows down or messes with me simply because I use Firefox (e.g., YouTube).
Dunno, Youtube works fine for me, watching without account. I don’t use anything else from Google, so can’t say if anything else is shit.
Who is this “we” you talk of?
A: Not all of us did.
2: It sucked for a while, performance went down the toilet till they rewrote the engine in quantum.
Honestly threading was horrible for a decade there, while chrome had multi-processes running solid, even extensions didn’t kill it, even if it burned 500gb ram to browse bash.org.
Experiments were bad too, but you could shut those off.
Yeah, it’s amazing how few people remember just how terrible its performance tanked. The memory leaks were truly unbearable.
I use IronFox because firefox decided to support bad practices. Kinda like google removing “don’t be evil”.
Um Sir, this is a Lemmy
I believe you’re thinking of a ToS change where the wording was incredibly vague, leading to some outlets to claim they were selling browsing data to 3rd parties and AI modelers. They changed it right after to specify that the data they were using wasn’t browsing data, and the data they did gather wouldn’t be used for AI. They are not as invasive as google, but you’re subject to Google on Firefox because of the ubiquity of their telemetry and search optimizations across websites. Firefox with an add-on such as noscript is much better than Chrome still, in my opinion. At the very least, it’s nice to have a browser that doesn’t work to undermine its own add-on functionalities.
This. It has been everywhere here around, if someone denies it, is lying! It was nothing in the end but in the meantime I tried Zen (based on FF) and it’s aesthetically more pleasing to me
What follows is a list of missteps Mozilla made since its inception. LibreWolf ftw. I hope Google has to divest of Chrome and forced to stop signing search deals to make them the default search engine on a browser. Can’t happen soon enough.
Because Librewolf exists and Mozilla became an adware vendor.
I never switched, I installed Chrome, started it, saw the UI, hated it, uninstalled it.
Still using it here
