I’m not saying to never use Firefox Android forks, but the reality is that Chromium forks are significantly more secure on Android, such as Mulch (same dev as Mull) and Chromite (Bromite fork).
Again, I am talking security, not privacy, and specifically for Android.
Here is a good write up on the topic from the developer of the Mull and Mulch browsers:
For desktop there are a lot of good Firefox forks, such as Mullvad’s Browser, Librewolf, & Waterfox. If a website needs Chrome to work, I just use Vivaldi or Ungoogled Chromium.
Edit: I’ve made this point a few times, and always with lots of downvotes, just kind of funny. Especially when I provided a technical write-up from the developer of a security focused distro (DivestOS) as well as two popular security focused Android browsers (Mull and Mulch), but hey, maybe you all know better than he does.
YouTube isn’t playing on Firefox with Ublock for me either. I’ll need to go through and reinstall my extensions, but I couldn’t find the root cause so far, I’d just been using chrome with ublock for YouTube and Firefox for everything else.
Make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com isn’t blocked anywhere in your network. It may perhaps be blocked in a filter list you have activated in uBO, DNS, VPN, Firewall, anti-virus, Firefox enhanced tracking protection, etc.
Its able to block some ads. However, from a security perspective this basically means google chrome is no longer a web browser that should be used in a professional setting, let alone for your private and personal work
100% don’t use it at home. I’m saying if you wouldn’t even use it at work (and you seriously shouldn’t anymore, its a total liability) you for sure shouldn’t use it at home
It’s not as comprehensive, but it still blocks ads. Personally, I’ve not noticed a difference. If you are a power user with custom rules and third party lists then your experience will vary.
I used Firefox when it first came out. Google and Mozzila got into a hot race to make the best browser and they both did well. Somehow I ended up using Chrome a lot more even though I thought that by the time the race ended they were pretty even. Both were very fast and had great plugin libraries. Chrome looked nicer out of the box, but Firefox is highly customizable. Since the end of that race, Chrome has gotten worse and Firefox is about the same. I’ve switched back fully to Firefox, and the only thing I miss is the “Piss off publisher frames” plugin, that I haven’t found a replacement for. It’s a nice browser.
I switched to chrome for several years. Back then I was using Gmail and google docs et cetera. I naively thought Google were the good guys.
At that time the chrome ui was better. As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
More recently I think the “nice ui” thing has tipped back towards Firefox. Chrome seems to have evolved some extra buttons.
Yeah, it’s ironic that one of Google’s selling points was that Chrome didn’t have a lot of clutter. It’s even where the name comes from. Now it looks messy. It’s no Microsoft product yet, but it’s definitely one of the ways it used to be better.
As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
The advantages of that was you could set the URL bar and search bar to different search engines. I would do a Google search with the URL bar while keeping the search bar set to Wikipedia. Eventually this feature was removed, and then the search bar itself (since there was no reason to search from the URL bar and a dedicated search bar.) It’s a feature I missed for a while, but I got over it.
I’m aware there are probably a hundred different ways to do what I want in Firefox, and that 99 of them are probably easier than the way I do them already. Now I just keep a Wiki tab open for when I want to search something.
I have never understood the desire to combine the search and the address fields. I occasional search a url when I forget the rules for what it thinks is keyword. It just seems like a scheme to collect more data by bouncing your intended site to google and increase your reliance on them rather than being a real UI feature.
I would be on Firefox myself except that I need Webassembly that functions at a decent speed and It's about 30-100 times slower on Firefox than it is on Chrome and hasn't changed in yeeeeears.
I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that even the United States FBI recommended using ad blocking extensions to protect yourself online.
What’s even worse is every time someone mentions Firefox, some chucklefuck has to go hardcore negative on everything Mozilla does that is 1/10th as shitty as Google. Just shut your piehole if you don’t like the only somewhat private open source browser.
Let's be honest, Mozilla is only 1/10 as shitty as Google because they're 1/100 the size. If they had the resources, they'd be just as awful. They've already shown us how awful they can be at their current size, I can't imagine how bad they'd be if they were at Google's scale. Firing your employees and giving your execs bonuses is 100% a Google-like move, and the only reason they stopped at a few hundred employees was because they didn't have more to give.
Just because they make a good open source product doesn't make them immune from criticism.
You severely underestimate how shitty Google is. I highly doubt Mozilla would try to pull shit like Web Integrity or making their sites work worse on competitor browsers on purpose even if they were as large as Google. (Though, maybe to become as large as Google they would have to start doing this kind of shit so you might be right in some way.)
My biggest worry about Mozilla is that most of their revenue comes from Google. What’s stopping Google from demanding that Mozilla does certain things to Firefox, like forcing them to reduce the ad blocking capabilities, just like Chrome?
Even if it didn’t have superior functionality, I’d still support & use firefox over chrome just because I don’t care how fast the sports car is: if it’s not going where I tell it to, I ain’t gettin’ in.
One is access to serial ports to flash ESP devices, or update the firmware on my XR glasses. Firefox can’t do that.
The other is to automate Twitch drop collection. The addon I found to reload broken streams and collect drops while I’m at work only has a Chrome version.
Looking at it, seems not. Google store page says it doesn’t follow best practices and may soon no longer be supported. AFAIK it’s a single dev hobby project so this might be the end of it. Ah well. I’ll just no longer have as many free skins for games.
Some websites intentionally break Firefox for some reason. I’ve had numerous issues on Firefox which were resolved by switching to Chrome. These could potentially be fixed by a User-Agent string change, but instead of dealing with it I switched to a Chromium based browser.
What if we stop using User-Agent altogether? It would increase privacy and prevent browser discrimination. Too bad for the Analytics services, but after all… who cares?
Last time I checked: tab groups. Yes there are extensions for it, but all the ones I tried were either really over complicated or buggy. Chrome tab groups are pretty simple and seamless to use.
But I’m going to have to figure something out because I’d rather lose tab groups than ad blocking, so I’ll have to switch to something.
Waterfox has a native sidebar/vertical tab feature along with container tabs that might fill your tab group needs (I stopped using chrome before they added tab groups so I watched a 4m video on them and seems like you could get all the features and more out of the sidebar).
My Windows computer was infected more than once by virus spreading ads on legitimate websites. The site owners denied any responsibility for the viruses saying it was the fault and responsibility of the ad companies. Never again.
Firefox breaks Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Jira, and several other internal/proprietary platforms I use. Many of our tools are integrated into each other (sometimes on the backend through the API, sometimes on the frontend through an iFrame), and Firefox really doesn't play nicely with these interactions. Either it doesn't like the fact that our apps are accessing multiple sites at a time and throws security errors, or it just doesn't render some parts of the page properly, making them unusable.
For instance, one ticketing tool we use is completely inaccessible in Firefox, because the page breaks after the header and loads the rest into a 10px-wide column that stretches for miles. Works fine in Chrome, Edge, and even Safari somehow.
Some of this could be fixed by using these platforms with their out-of-the-box software which may be more compatible with Firefox, without our modifications. But our mods are there because these integrations drastically improve our workflows, so that's unfortunately not a feasible option for our business.
A lot of this is due to Firefox having stricter standards, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe our developers should make our tools more standard-compliant and that might be better in the long run. But until then, I gotta use what works.
Firefox, unfortunately, has been lagging behind. Safari is close to surpassing Firefox if they haven’t already. Safari really made a big shift for actually implementing web standards around 16.4.
No HDR - relevant for me because I mod PC games for HDR
Dropped PWA on desktop - even Apple went full 180° and embraced it now on Mac OS X. Chrome really gets a good push from this from Microsoft constantly helping push more app manifest stuff since it appears one of their goals is to render more things over Edge PWAs (eg: like the title bar), and resort less to having to use electron.
No masked borders - can’t do custom element borders like corner cutting or perfect squircles. Rounded edges only
Chrome is still the absolute best for accessibility. Neither Firefox nor Safari properly parse the aria labels when it comes to how things are rendered. Chrome will actually render text in accessibility nodes as presented on screen (ie: with spacing). Safari and Firefox only use .textContent which can have words beingmergedwhentheyshouldn’t.
Chrome also has Barcode and NFC scanning built right in. I’ve had to use fake keyboard emulators for iOS. Though, Chrome on Mac OS X also supports it. Safari has native support for Barcode behind a flag, so it’ll likely come in the future. Barcode scanning is still possible with Firefox through direct reading of the camera bitmap, which is slower but still good. There’s no solution for NFC for Safari, but if Chrome ever comes iOS, that would possibly be solved. I believe Face Detection is similar, but I’ve never used it.
Even line-height in CSS3 is draft. Saying no drafts should be implemented is a ridiculous standpoint: a standpoint not even Firefox aligns with:
Standardization requirements for shipping features
What evidence is necessary will vary, but generally this will be:
W3C - the specification is at the Candidate Recommendation maturity level or more advanced; shipping from a Working Draft or a less advanced specification requires evidence of agreement within the working group that shipping is acceptable
I believe that some organizations restrict what applications can be installed on work computers, so that might not necessarily be true, at least for work machines.
My organization has blocked all browsers other than Edge and Chrome - and has also blocked all plugins except for UBlock. For security reasons, of course.
For all the firefox fans out there it might be good to note there have consistently been more Safari users than Firefox users since 2014. Hell Safari has been the number two browser by market share since 2015.
Browsers have to get very SHITTY or a new browser has to have a killer app to unseat a dominate one.
Those are all just skins on safari. Until like 6 months ago you couldn’t install any web browser with a renderer other than safari. And that’s only in the EU.
As I understand it, any browser on iPhone has to be built on WebKit, so even if you install fire fox or chrome, it’s running on a totally different web engine than the desktop version. Making them more safari re-skins in the same way that stuff like brave or opera are just chrome reskins.
some people stick with safari, but no one is replacing chrome, fire fox, or edge with safari. People choose to replace edge because it is obtrusive and annoying to use, safari isn’t.
In that context, safari is not a competitor for Firefox in the same way chrome is. It’s comparing apples to oranges.
And I mean, there’s still time now. Switching browsers isn’t that bad. Export+import some bookmarks and adjust some settings, good to go.
I think FF has been a good option for a while. But the second best time is now. I can totally get it if people didn’t want to switch until they had more of a concrete problem.
FF still hasn’t brought back a tab group API for extensions or native tab groups. Extensions can only do so much given what they have to work with. I still use FF on the side, but it simply isn’t a practical as a primary browser for me currently.
But for casual users, many probably have never even touched their browser settings.
Tab groups are coming but in the mean time containers work well enough for me with the added benefit that they’ll also block tracking from the sites that are within them.
windowscentral.com
Oldest