This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.
[Yes, I know, the horror]
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.
I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.
You also get ad filtering and you can download Audio/Video streams from within the app.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.
Mullvad Browser
Tor Browser for those occasions
Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
If you wanted to point to the year where they've been the best financed they've ever been and where they've had the most resources invested into browser development they ever have, that year would be 2026. Only to be exceeded by 2027 and then 2028, 2029 and beyond.
At a bare minimum, their endowment gives them probably a two to three year firewall in the event that their funding is cut off, which it hasn't been. I also thought the accusation was supposed to be the other way around, namely that we all knew they were going to get funded into perpetuity as controlled opposition.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot. And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.
As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.
> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.
Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.
EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.
--------
[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…
Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.
Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?
Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)
i.e. when firefox does it, people wonder why they aren't using chrome. That's the entire point. The only thing that makes firefox attractive is if they don't do what google does, and they do almost everything google does.
Even if it results in extended campaigns of complaints and hostility from their most devoted users, and the loss of 95% of their installs. As far as I can tell the only thing they backed down on was destroying ublock, and that's because they recognized that it was an existential threat to firefox. The 3% market share that they have now would have become 0.3%, no matter what google did to prop them up.
I certainly don't recommend firefox any more. The amount of effort I have to go through to get the standard 2010 experience quality is absurd and I can't expect anyone else to think it's worth it. It's not worth it to dodge any of this bad behavior anymore, it's industry standard. Going through the effort of dodging it makes you stand out more, and makes you more trackable and targetable. For me it's just compulsive, and my values don't change when the values of the crowd changes. But I can't expect anyone else to download and maintain a git repo that allows you to have basic control over your UI, or to fill out captchas after every pageload.
If you're going to use plain firefox, you might as well use plain chrome. Both of them have the same degree of respect for you, and both of them are owned by the same company. Using plain firefox for freedom is like using an Android phone for freedom. It's amusing that google gets to play the "bad guy" in one of those stories (browser wars) and gets to play the "good guy" in the other (mobile wars.) It's all keyfabe. None of these companies are competing with each other.
> while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Wise words.
Firefox does debatable thing, expressed outrage is at Level 11
but when
Chrome does far worse version of thing, expressed outrage is at Level Shrug.It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
Man, so many things could be better if people cared.
He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
a private political donation from 10 years earlier
Is bigotry always a permanent condition?
I understand that it is difficult for me to shun (which is basically what I'm talking about) so many people, or to even know if they should be shunned, but it would definitely be my preference.
Making Mozilla a politically-extremist organization intolerant to other opinions than theirs, and thus incompatible with being a steward of the global web.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
The goal was to offer folks a means of supporting the development of a privacy-preserving browser, at no cost to them. We blogged about the feature at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, and ultimately disabled it by default. But there was never any "hijacking of links," or "swapping of affiliate codes".
The truth is less exciting, I know.
When pushback increased, it seemed like it was addressed and then retroactively labeled a bug.
Your own dismissiveness of the issue on Twitter, including posting an image which didn't reflect the actual user experience in Brave stable at the time, left a similarly bad taste: https://imgur.com/a/x9smj6M
We didn't make anything from this bug, fixed it quickly, it's a black mark on our shield still but it wasn't some mustache-twirling grand plan, believe me. It was a blunder.
The action of performing real-life drastic sanctions against people you don’t tolerate is an extremism.
And it is the general opinion of most Mozilla idealists. Mozilla is a political project, and is dangerous to our democracy.
Using the 3 regularly, no, Firefox is not "10 times better than Safari". Though, yes, Chrome(ium) is a ressource hog.
I always end up coming back to Safari for personal use. It seems to do the best job getting out of my way. I am annoyed by how Safari now handles browser extensions. I’d like them to take a page out of Orion’s book and support both Firefox and Chrome extensions. However, I generally have very few extensions, as they tend to slow things down, so this has been a relatively minor issue. The main things I’ve wanted extensions for in other browsers (like word lookup) have come out of the box in Safari (or Apple platforms as a whole) for quite a long time.
EDIT: whoops, should've scrolled down a bit on the website, looks like Waterfox has vertical tabs as well. damn, probably going to try to migrate to it sometime soon...
EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
If people read the release notes instead of the comment sections, not only would they have a lot more specific knowledge of the work going into the browser but they wouldn't be locked in this cycle of outrage and escalation that normally you only see in YouTube comment sections.
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.
I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.
Having said that, I keep a copy of Ungoogled Chromium for those websites that refuse to test against FF.
Plus there's the Wikipedia link another user posted.
People have problems with what they choose to program, not the quality of their code. I too have used FF since the beginning, but switched to Waterfox last year (it took me about two years to make that decision - I didn't make it lightly). I chose WF in large part because its profile remains compatible with FF so I can switch back if they calm the F down and start acting normal again for long enough to rebuild some trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mozilla_Corporati... - start at the end for most recent.
Also go to the website of any one of the FF forks and read their reasons for existing. For example:
Which ones are you talking about? I'm talking about Firefox, not the Mozilla Corp to be clear.
Anyway, for a browser that keeps touting how it's privacy-centered, they sure as hell love doing horrible things.
Cliqz is a great example; here's a direct quote from Mozilla (emphasis mine):
> "Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit."
This was not opt-in. It was automatically enabled for a percentage of users in (I believe) Germany. Not only is it a blatant breach of the privacy promise, it's such a massive breach it's almost on the cartoon villainy level.
But for me personally, the final straw was the yet-another-pointless-UI-change at or around v103 (or thereabouts, I don't recall the exact version). When they removed icons from a bunch of menus and went with the rounded style. That version's UI redesign worsened accessibility in so many ways, and complaints by visually-impaired users were simply ignored. All for the sake of a UI redesign yet again.
I consider myself an advanced user, and even I get annoyed by the changes. Now imagine someone not tech savvy, e.g. my mother, trying to use Firefox, when the UI suddenly changes between versions. I can adapt to changes far more easily than them (not that I want to, but Mozilla keeps wanting to force it), but for some, it's going to be a struggle. For that reason alone, I can no longer recommend Firefox to non-tech-savvy people (and I used to!).
Meanwhile, Chrome, although I dislike its UI, has kept it relatively stable throughout. People get used to it, and it stays that way. They don't have to learn new things or change their habits. Now, there are a myriad of issues with Chrome, but constant UI rug-pulls aren't one of them.
That's why I'm comparing Mozilla to Microsoft. They ignore users, and shove changes nobody asked for down their throats --- even if it makes things worse for everyone. The UI change, for example, is kind of like the new context menu in Windows Explorer. On top of that, they tout being privacy-focused everywhere in the marketing, but then their actions show the exact opposite.
For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.
Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
Even if that were true, it's still a better option _today_.
you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders
There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!