To be honest, because it was pre-installed in Linux Mint. I got a first laptop, and I didn’t know differences between Windows and GNU+Linux. Hell, I was searching for “pure Linux”. I didn’t know that’s just kernel, neither what kernel is anyway. And I just decided for Mint. At the time, I considered Windows “just another distribution or whatever”.
I did get to briefly use school computers before that. There I preferred internet explorer over both Chrome and Firefox. Yeah. Chrome kept crashing, Firefox didn’t load many pages (it was probably well outdated) but IE just worked, much faster than Chrome, somehow.
Originally I started to use it because I’d heard there was a new update to its rendering engine that made it feel faster/better than chrome. After testing it out I did think it felt better at the very least. Now I’m using it mostly for the same reasons and to reduce my dependence on Google/Chrome.
Because Google is more profit and ad-focused than Mozilla (though both force ads down my throat), and they are the only viable choices for browsing the web.
I long for an actual non-profit backed, open-source browser to use, but until then, lesser of two evils.
There’re some nice UI features that I’m not sure could be achieved with extensions and some of the privacy features include having removed some statistics tracking that can’t be disabled in stock Firefox.
Firefox also comes with some preinstalled extensions like Pocket, and that screenshot tool. With WaterFox you can choose not to install those.
Because I feel shamed every time I check privacytools.io if I don’t.
/s it’s great but I need a chromium backup. Brave is the best chromium clone I know.
Btw, if y’all want to download pure firefox, check this, there’s a better official download link with less tracking. In any case, I use weakened librewolf with Medium Ublock blocking (block all 3rd party scripts and frames and enable scripts only for logged sites since they are tracking me through other means anyway)
You might check out privacy guides instead of privacy tools. Basically, the owner of privacy tools wouldn’t make changes that the community wanted, causing privacy guides to be formed.
Read both, form your own opinion. I don’t like how tools has what amounts to ads on it.
I’m happy with Brave for the most part but an update with Webview or something broke all browsers using it on my Android Dash unit so I was actually forced to switch to Firefox simply because it works. Now I’m considering switching over on all my devices.
upload.wikimedia.org
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