Have uBlock Origin enabled :D
Must admit, didn't read the thread and agree :)
I can do without these tools (not an easy task) but not my coworkers.
(I personally use Firefox since I feel it's a much better browser (especially thanks to Firefox Multi-Account Containers), so can't comment on quality since I just tested it briefly.. but I do use Orion as my main browser on iOS where it's amazing.)
Of course, browsers with an alternative engine like Gecko or Webkit are preferable to keep the web open.
b) grow up
Can you link to these games?
But the intended audience of my comment is the vast majority of people that dislike the direction Google is taking Chrome and the web at large, and do absolutely no effort for, quite frankly, inane reasons.
[citation needed]
The vast majority of people don’t care, even if you restrict the population to developers
Did you miss the first part of that sentence?
1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones)
2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)
3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto)
4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)
Firefox is much less of a memory hog than Chrome, in my use case.
Safari is the best for browsing. I just don't like its devtools.
I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
I don't think it is as lean as some versions of old Firefox, but I have no problems with 500 - 1000 tabs (and I often run it next to a full IDE + VSCode + Firefox ++).
I struggle to understand how you might skip Firefox because it was a hog in the past (it's free to try. It's been fine for years.), but are ready to jump in the loving embrace of another known bad, if not worse, actor.
To me "I'm being spied constantly and my data is being sold for profit" has much more weight than "once upon a time I had to restart the browser every other day"
Safari is faster, better privacy and requires far less resources e.g. battery life, memory.
Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.
Note that Edge is more or less Chrome except account / telemetry going to Microsoft not Google.
Now that 1Password natively supports Orion (they had a browser whitelist), I can probably switch back to it on my personal machines / iPhone, but Safari is still pretty sticky for my non-work life.
Between that and all the constantly increasing push of their other products I eventually gave up and switched back to Chrome.
When I open a new tab, Brave tells me:
Trackers & ads blocked 36,822
Bandwidth saved 5.62GB
Time saved 3.3hours
Which is definitely a feature I like.
It's Chromium-based with a custom UI (in SwiftUI). It's very clean and Mac-native.
Our best hope is for a fork of Chromium to be maintained by the Linux Foundation and for other vendors (and Electron) to use that fork instead. Just moving Electron over would provide significant momentum.
De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.
So these 3 things aren't really that insane, WEI is easily the worst of them.
In the meantime,
a) Chrome does everything I need while providing the highest security value.
b) Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed
It's not laziness, I make the conscious choice to use Chrome because I think it's the best browser right now. I use Brave on Mobile and I haven't switched on my laptop yet because I haven't evaluated it.
Is this because of your opinion on the fairness of her salary, or some other issue?
What childish nonsense has you all up in arms for a product you don't pay for?
1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up.
2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.
3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.
4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively.
She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.
I am not betting on Mozilla's future, I'm not going to assume that they're capable of competing at all let alone competing while maintaining a vision of the open web. They're dysfunctional and it starts right at the top.
The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary.
And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.
...
> And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.
It's quite hard to take your ideological stance seriously.
1. I use Chrome because Chrome works best for me
2. People are proposing I use Firefox because Firefox has a mission that people want to align with
3. Firefox has terrible leadership and can not execute on their mission, I am not switching browsers to one that's run by an utter failure unless they either build a much better browser or they fire the fool who has put them in this position
And nobody is asking you to "bet on" Firefox. If you start using it and the company somehow collapses, you could switch to another browser in less than 10 minutes. You don't need to buy stock in Mozilla or something.
Mozilla has a terrible CEO, Google has nothing to do with that.
Google only has to do with that because this thread is about GP using Chrome instead of Firefox because of Mozilla‘a CEO.
What do Firefox’s enterprise market share and Mozilla’s initiatives that are unrelated to Firefox have to do with whether Firefox would work for you as a browser?
> What childish nonsense has you all up in arms for a product you don't pay for?
If this is your argument for not using Firefox, then it does read like the reason you're not using it is that it isn't popular with others.
lol another way of framing that is that her compensation makes up something like 30-40% of all user donations made to Mozilla. I think that's far more relevant than whatever Google's CEO makes.
> If this is your argument for not using Firefox, then it does read like the reason you're not using it is that it isn't popular with others.
All of my points are supporting my overall issue - that Mozilla can not execute on its mission effectively while their current CEO is in place.
The absolute failure to maintain market share is obviously quite relevant. If market share didn't matter in order to advance an ideology then we wouldn't be in this situation right now and there would be no reason for me to switch anyway.
So no, I'm not going to make a decision to support a browser that has one benefit to me - its ideology - when their leader is obviously incapable of executing effectively on that ideology. If they remove her as CEO then maybe someone who is effective can take place, at which point my support puts ideology back on the table and I'll consider switching.
Oh come on now, that's a ridiculous statement. That's AT BEST one year for a small team of 5 people working anywhere near Mozilla's headquarters.
So use LibreWolf like me:
Up to date, based on Firefox, but without Mozilla getting a cent.
If I'm going to switch for ideological purposes I'm going to need to see a browser that can actually follow through on its ideology.
1. I use Chrome because Chrome works best for me
2. People are proposing I use Firefox because Firefox has a mission that people want to align with
3. Firefox has terrible leadership and can not execute on their mission, I am not switching browsers to one that's run by an utter failure unless they either build a much better browser or they fire the fool who has put them in this position
This is not complicated. If you're asking me to use a worse product (from my perspective) for ideological reasons, which I actually align with, then using that product had better actually advance that ideology - something I do not believe Mozilla is capable of doing while their current CEO is sitting. I have then expressed why I believe the CEO is incapable and a failure. Saying "But Google's CEO is bad" doesn't change that - I'm not using Chrome because of ideological reasons.
This seems insane to have to spell out repeatedly.
Browsing the issue about it (https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338), it seems that manifest v3 blocks quite a lot of stuff out of the box. The fundamental issue seems to be that by mv3 prevents you from running arbitrary code to do filtering. This is concerning because it means that if sites / ad networks start coming up with ways to serve ads which can't be blocked by DeclarativeNetRequest (the issue lists a few), then ublock origin won't be able to block those ads. The way it's framed in the issue is "DNR is an obstacle to innovation."
There is currently a workaround in "ublock origin lite" (the mv3-compliant version) which lets you opt into regular ublock-origin-style filtering on a per-site basis. Even if this workaround isn't removed, it still means ... opting in to full filtering on a per-site basis, and acknowledging a browser warning each time.
MV3 clearly puts control of how ad-blocking works back into the hands of the company who supplies the browser and makes its money by serving ads.
So the goal is to remove that power, so that it can not be abused. Then the question is "and how do we solve the legitimate use cases?" - hence the years of working with people like Gorhill to help build a better API to serve the ad blocking use case.
MV3 was delayed because, despite the numerous changes made to MV3 to satisfy these use cases, it's clear that there needs to be more work to do so.
- Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it
- I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists)
Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.
(I also think that its devtools are really good too, but I imagine habit is a large part of that. Of course, it's also an option to open Chrome only when you need the devtools.)
I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried either of those, maybe I'll give it another shot.
I also just realized neither of these conveniences are relevant on my work laptop. Firefox is approved by my company IT and a lot of my coworkers use it. I'm going to switch today.
I’ve heard you can do the same with Brave.
This was the primary reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox (mobile only initially, then full-on switch due to my desire to sync between mobile and PC). The later manifest v3 push only further validate my choice.
My laptop is a Chromebook.
I need to re-research how to get Linux on this thing.
I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience).
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
This might also interest you: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run :
firefox --ProfileManager
> I also can't open links in anything but the default profile
Interesting. Running on Linux here, and links open in whatever profile is currently in use.
I do know there's a flag to launch the profile manager, but I find that to be a nuisance. I don't want to launch it every time, because I'm constantly launching and killing browser instances. Dedicated shortcuts cuts out that step, but in my case would require 5+ shortcuts via .desktop files on my Linux machine, and a matching set of icons on my Windows machine, with the mental overhead that comes from selecting and switching.
The extension is much closer to the behavior I want (Chrome's).
Conversely, I experience a frustrating Chrome bug on Linux, where after some amount of time, external links open a new instance of every profile, and an error window. I've had no luck troubleshooting that, and it helped motivate me to try Firefox again.
That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".
It takes a few seconds on my machine, and has the same result as switching profiles. But I accept your situation may be different, and would be interested to know what you see as its deficiencies.
Are you saying that in Firefox you have to exit the entire browser to do the same thing?
If you look at the comment to which I was responding, the poster wanted his history and BOOKMARKS replaced when switching profiles. What you're talking about are containers, that do not replace your bookmarks (for example). For what you're talking about, there is no need to restart Firefox.
If what you want to do is have a completely different browser, with separate bookmarks and other settings, then you can start another instance, with a separate profile. It is very easy and takes a few seconds at most. And in fact, there is no need to shut down other profiles if you want more than one open at a time, so you can maintain all your current state when doing so.
Next frame... "Why is Google so powerful and doing evil things?"
This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations)
Slow rendering is for sure a problem.
Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms.
And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly.
Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.
If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome.
That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.
I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers).
I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up.
Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.
I then tried the same flow on Chrome (including the validation error) and couldn't get it to repro; things just worked. Totally possible that the actual failure was unrelated to the browser -- I never tried to establish a consistent reproduction on Firefox.
The other one was using SAP Concur for an expense report in a corporate environment. This is a horrible experience regardless of browser, but I ended up closing out Firefox and finishing the report in Chrome because things kept giving me strange errors.
You've come to believe that Firefox is broken with respect to Chrome. When in reality you only know that websites work better in Chrome. But that's not because Chrome works better, it's because those web teams only test against Chrome, and when Chrome is broken, they break their own website to match, so it works in Chrome but not other browsers.
This is exactly the danger being highlighted in this thread. How long until the DMV site and Concur (and other sites) have little notes that say "Chrome required to use this website"? And then we're right back to the bad old IE days again.
The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.
'a product' and I've got an Amazon search for the product.
'w topic' and I've searched Wikipedia for the topic.
'wt place' and I've searched for the weather at a place.
'm place' and I've searched Google maps for the place.
'd topic' and I've searched DuckDuckGo for the topic.
etc.
Whatever chrome doesn’t or does doesn’t matter to me. I just use it to do my job and occasionally shop on Amazon or watch Netflix. Or come here on HN. I visit maybe ten unique websites.. If chrome starts to suck big like IE back in the day then I’ll use some other browser that works best for all the sites I visit.
As long as it works best for most sites I visit, that’s fine by me.
I have a life outside the computer, which is funded by the computer. I can just turn it off after work and do an infinite number of other things.
- No download bar to show actual downloads (downloaded files are hidden under a menu icon)
- No built-in page translate
- Search: is in bottom left rather than top-right which is pretty standard in most UIs.
- Search: would be nice if "Highlight All" were on by default (though it's caused me problems on Chrome with large documents so I can see off by default having some advantage.)
- Search: most of those options should probably be hidden under "advanced" or some expandable menu.
- I don't like the scrolling tab view where I can only see less than 10 tabs at once. I'd rather they get really tiny like on Chrome rather than totally hidden. Otherwise it's unclear to me at a glance how many tabs I have open.
- Youtube seems to have higher CPU usage compared to chrome (at least on MacOS x86, non-fullscreen)
- Tabs are too easy to mute and seem less intuitive which ones are playing.
- Dev tools doesn't have the “lighthouse” audit tool.
- Would be nice if cmd+shift+n shortcut matched webkit/blink behavior. I'm slowly learning to use cmd+shift+p instead, but being consistent with all the other browsers would be nice.
It's an extension, look up Firefox Translate. It's even local-only. Or Google Translate for better results but less privacy.
This is the sort of thing that other people might consider "bloat"
- It "failed" while trying to use Google Meet for work. I don't remember the details of the incident, but it was embarrassing enough that it made me switch, at least for work stuff
- No Chromecast support
- Buggier than Chrome in general: last I remember was an issue with page scaling when printing
- No desktop integration of PWAs (i.e. launcher icon, standalone window). This is what I missed the most as a Linux desktop user.
- Slower than Chrome, at least on Android
Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia, there is a circle of hell dedicated to those too lazy to take a stance. If it were written today, it would include a lot of tech workers running Chrome with uBlock enabled.
It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.