I recently did the switch, pretty similar in terms of experience. Only thing I can point out about firefox is that chrome's page translator is faster and more efficient. I'm using the Google translate extension, if someone knows off a better one.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It's no wonder. It's because people aren't actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they're "concerned about privacy" many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with "what are you willing to do about it", you'll find that the answer is a resounding "not a God damn thing". If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the "do-you-care-about-privacy meter". It's the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
expired
Chrome does have a use, namely Selenium and automation.
I'm guilty of having Chrome on my PC, as I need to nerf over my favourites to Firefox.
Firefox is my browser of choice on my Google Pixel 7, but then again no doubt it makes little difference.
I just choose to use a VPN, so any targeted adverts are blocked regardless of the profile built up from my browsing habits.
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With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn't understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that's what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can't immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don't care.
If only Firefox's management had its head screwed on better. I really don't care about Turning Red themes, I have a KDE theme just to keep it matching my desktop. Just make the core browsing experience better. Hell, take some features from Vivaldi. I've noticed a good portion of Vivaldi users back when I used Reddit were former Firefox users, and I can understand why.
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With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. "People" don't care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout "shiny feature that you won't even use". Even some privacy-focused people don't see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything "convenient" to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking "yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won't host anything and you'll keep all our data, deal?". They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
FWIW, latest Firefox nightlies have caught up to Chrome in terms of performance. I have been a Firefox user since the 3.5 days, I was briefly swayed by Chrome because of performance until I came back for the Quantum update and stuck with it ever since. The updates have been great and Firefox + ubo + Nextdns is a solid combination.
Lol Firefox has always been good. Like I care about .2s of increased page load speed.
Tbh, they trade blows all the time but I value privacy so I've been using Firefox for decades.
Firefox has been and in some cases still is far, far worse than .2s slower, but even not considering that, the reality is that chrome has more support and thus gets more development and attention.
This results in some websites not working properly or at all on Firefox, while this isn't Firefox's fault it is a thing nevertheless
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Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
Firefox's sole income stream comes from them leading you into google search.
Well that's blatantly untrue. Or if it is true, it must certainly come as a shock to the Mozilla Foundation.
Well, the last time I've looked into their financials it looked something like this(numbers are not precise, Im talking from memory, no way im diving in it again): The mozilla corpiration, which is a for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation, earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million dollars, with overwhelming majority of it coming from google, rest from yandex and baidu. They've spent most of it on firefox devs salaries and moved 13ish million to mozilla foundation, the NPO. The Mozilla Foundation itself earned somewhere around 13 mil, too, with about a mil coming from direct donations, rest from grants. They've spent it on evangelistic purposes, like on events in fuck knows where, stuff not directly related to firefox(vpn, vr stuff), grants to other projects (like rust), but mostly into managements pockets. None of that goes to firefox the browser.
As you can see, Mozilla is completely at a mercy of Google, especially after the deal with yandex fell through due to sactions. Otherwise, they don't have nearly enough resources to keep up as is, nevermind losing 95% of revenue. There is a glimmer of hope for them pivoting into mozilla ecosystem, like with VPN and password manager, but I havent heard about those in a while, and the competetion is stiff there, but Im keeping my hopes up.
TOR browser is built off of Firefox and is even more private.
This kid is a dumb pile of shit. I recommend everyone block him.
Seems someone forgot their meds.
True, but it is insanely slow, and blacklisted by many websites.
https://librewolf.net/ and Mull at https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps are good options as well if you rather not use TOR.
Yeah I use both
I used to use Brave and saw that article last week about how they are selling your data for AI training. I instantly jumped to Firefox
Source: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
Well, you read misinformation then.
I personally use brave since a year, and it work like a charm.
Bought a new Pixel 7 Pro and wanted to use Firefox but scrolling was just so bad, lots of stuttering. Using Brave now and am very happy with it. You have to turn off some sneaky shit initially though.
I would love to and have tried. But I've found too many times that Firefox just doesn't work for some sites. And unfortunately some of those sites are needed for my work.