10 Reasons You Should Switch From Chrome to Firefox.

TypicalHog , 3 months ago

Why not Brave?
I mean... Firefox is fine, just, some of the extensions I need for example are not available on it.

franklin , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Even Brave uses Chromium as a launching point before all of its customizations.

This in turn gives Google control over web standards because if they choose not to support something or if they implement it in a particular way they effectively govern it's adoption because of their near universal market share.

I'm sure I missed a lot of nuance but this is my best take at explaining it.

TypicalHog , 2 months ago

That is a good point!

lefaucet , 3 months ago

Preach!

I'm convinced that were it not for Mozilla, microsoft would have prevented google from taking over. We'd be in a shittyworld controlled by the asinine cerification heierarchy of microsoft obfuscation.

MS owned a big chunk of Apple before Safari was a thing and they had crazy drm-ish plans with IE before they got thwacked with the monoploy stick by the feds in the late nineties.
Netscape was on the ropes and there was essentially no one left.

I think it's time for Google to be thwacked. Apple too. They're going really anti-consumer in shady ways leading us to a weird new AI/surveillence capitalism led middle ages... Like no new knowledge, education will be towards the new corporate capitalist religion that gets people to serve their lords and noone has money or knowledge but the king and a few of their buddies. They'll grant the shineyist most deluded followers with a meaningless knighthoods that only serve to get that person laid so others will strive to sacrifice for the king so they can win the knighthood lottery and get laid and raisea family in a nice house... Anyway...

It's no good. We gotta skip straight to the next Renaissance where everyone has control over their identity, data and thoughts and can follow their own god in peace and healthy debate. And everone has healthcare and basic needs met and we're all moving towards Star Trek.

Moving towards Star Trek is what made the 90's great... Well, more accurate to say it was the great thing out of the nineties; before the new fascisism riding the 9/11 fear wave and the TSA and before 'enshittification' was a word.

Anyway... What was I sayinf?

Oh yeah Open source all the way!

AzureRT , 3 months ago

Firefox is king (saying this as someone who actually likes it, not as a fanboy)

killpunchdeluxe , 3 months ago

Mozilla in general honestly is pretty awesome ngl

They have this nonprofit called Privacy Not Included that rates companies/products based on how much they respect user privacy.

Modern cars collect literally everything they can about you. Low key kinda scary yo

Privacy Not Included

olivebranch , 3 months ago

I just need one, being able to change if something in the code is against my interests.

thorbot , 3 months ago

10 reasons:

1. I always used Firefox
2. I always used Firefox
3. I always used Firefox
4. I always used Firefox
5. I always used Firefox
6. I always used Firefox
7. I always used Firefox
8. I always used Firefox
9. I always used Firefox
10. Google can suck my saggy man tits

odelik , 3 months ago

I switched on my personal devices (need to use chrome for gsuite integrations at work).

On desktop, it's great and I'm loving it. And kicking myself for not switching back sooner after the massive-years-long-memory-leak was finally fixed a few years back

On mobile, it's mostly great. The privacy focus, ad block support, and plug-in support is a plus. But I realllly want the tab groups that mobile Chrome introduced a while back. That had such a great mobile UX that I've found myself still loading up chrome now and then when I find myself wanting that UX. I looked to see if there were plugins that could make that possible, but was disappointed to see none and let down that it seems impossible with the current tab implementation.

phreekno , 3 months ago

Firefox Multiaccount Containers, the thing that can't be beat by even the best chrome derivatives

latetolemmy , 3 months ago

Thanks but I'm sticking to Brave

Delusion6903 , 3 months ago

Forgetting politics, I liked Brave. But sometimes they do seem a little shady. I'm loving Librewolf even more, though there's no Android version. It does sync with Firefox and Mull though.

5opn0o30 , 3 months ago

I love Firefox. Been enjoying DDG browser on iOS.

nao , 3 months ago

using chrome in 2024

werefreeatlast , 3 months ago

And one thing that irks is that you can't have a local file be your homepage and new tab page. I want to have all my work related links in a local immutable HTML page and every new tab or every time I open the browser it goes there for me to choose what of 5 links to pick....time sheet, team site, hr site, all the vendors sites etc...npr, my home servers etc. c'mon man! The only way to make it happen is to serve it on a local server that I am not allowed to install, or a server at home that I don't actually want to do.

mac , 3 months ago

Host it on Netlify or something similar, it's free.

JaY_III , 3 months ago

Extensions are your friend
My new tab has all my sites pinned. Have a look at the add-ons I am 99% sure what you want has already been made

werefreeatlast , 3 months ago

Add-ons have no access to the local system anymore:

https://mastodon.social/@werefreeatlast/112004523925195688

You know, for security reasons.

pathief , 3 months ago

I've been moving away from Google in the last year and moving to Firefox was one of my first moves. It's honestly a downgrade in usability but I guess that applies to all alternative products.

I just wish I could sync my bookmarks between desktop and mobile. Seems like no one has this problem but firefox sync just does not work for me. It just says last update was never. Let me know if you know how to fix it.

ExperimentalGuy , 3 months ago

What was the downgrade in usability you saw? I used to be an avid chrome user turned Firefox, but I would say the opposite.

pathief , 3 months ago

• Tab Grouping would be my first pick.

• When I first started using Firefox on Linux, dragging tabs was really reallyyyyyy bad but they have heavily improved it. UI just feels more polished on chrome

• Sync doesn't work for me, though it seems to work for everyone else. It doesn't give me any error or a hint to what the problem might me, which is just bad UX.

• Chromecasting an entire tab doesn't work, though I guess can't we can't blame Firefox for that, can we?

• My unit tests take at the very least twice as long to run on Firefox

• Pinned tabs occasionally just disappear and I have to create everything again. Extensions exist to prevent this but don't work with multi containers, which is honestly Firefox best feature.

ExperimentalGuy , 3 months ago

What stops you from finding extensions that implement similar functionality? I know tree style tabs are pretty popular instead of tab grouping. This also so the first time I've heard of sync or pinned tabs not working. I'm kinda curious ab ur setup if youd be cool with sharing that? I feel like it might be a setup problem instead of a software one.

pathief , 3 months ago

Firefox extensions can't mess with Firefox tabs. Sure you have extensions such as tree style tabs but they don't really change the tab bar, they add side-panel with your tabs in a tree style format. This means you end up with a tab bar and a tab panel, which is a bit clunky. There are ways to hide the tab bar by messing with the userChrome file but that's not user friendly at all.

I don't have any particular setup that is too outrageous or different from anyone else. I just use Firefox, whatever is the most recent version in the arch repository. Ocasionally I open the browser and I don't have any pinned tabs, I don't know why. It's not a frequent event or something tied to anything I can think off, it just appears to be random.

The sync problem has been reported here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1879022

ExperimentalGuy , 2 months ago

Damn I was wrong my b. Haha at least now I know Firefox doesn't work everywhere, I appreciate it.

pathief , 2 months ago

It still works and is my daily driver! On both mobile and desktop!

I think it's extremely important to support Google alternatives and I will continue to do so. Firefox still has pain points and recognizing them is also important.

cuchilloc , 3 months ago

Just log out and log back in, and make sure you use the same account on both machines .

pathief , 3 months ago

I've done that several times.

Delusion6903 , 3 months ago

Sync works great over here. It even syncs history which is great because I use an extension on the laptop to limit history to 28 days and that becomes synced with Android without an additional extension.

Kedly , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I feel like anyone on Lemmy who isnt yet using Firefox is the kind of person who isnt going switch now because an article told them they should

edit: it seems I had a stroke (not seriously) while writing this message, and have since edited it so it makes sense

daddyjones , 3 months ago

Does anyone have any experience with Firefox on Android?

RunAroundDesertYou , 3 months ago

For me it is great on a smartphone but pretty underwhelming on my android tablet. It doesn't scale websites properly on the larger screen and doesn't support a tab list on top anymore (like Firefox on desktops).

antihumanitarian , 3 months ago

It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.

Drummyralf , 3 months ago

Works mostly great. Addons like uBlock Origin and Super Agent (auto reject all cookies) is great for your mobile experience.

I noticed Youtube site sometimes has weird framerates. But since Google removed premium lite subscription, I refuse to use the Youtube app and just view with uBlock in browser, even with the framerate issues.

laughterlaughter , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Yes. It used to suck, say, 10 years ago. My baseline was Youtube and Reddit (back then, okay?) Could I watch Youtube videos the same way as with Chrome or Android browser? No? Then, not ready. Did i.reddit.com open fine? No? Not ready.

Then it happened. And I switched and it has been wonderful ever since.

The only thing that I miss is the "pull down page to reload" gesture [EDIT: THANK YOU ALL! I'VE ENABLED IT - GREAT!!!!]. Not sure why Firefox hasn't implemented that yet. Patents? And also, when a video is in an iframe, it won't respect the "block autoplay" feature. The rest is dandy.

camelbeard , 3 months ago

I don't really visit reddit anymore, but still end up there sometimes because of a google search. Anyway there is an extension for Firefox Android to always show old Reddit. So you don't have to log in or install the app.

laughterlaughter , 3 months ago

Yup. I know all that. But I was talking about back then when Mobile Firefox simply didn't render reddit correctly. As soon as it did, I switched.

eatfudd , 3 months ago

Settings > customize. Pull to refresh is there

laughterlaughter , 3 months ago

You change my life. Thanks!

cujo255 , 3 months ago

You can enable the refresh gesture in the settings in Firefox

laughterlaughter , 3 months ago

Thanks!

Blackmist , 3 months ago

Yeah, it's alright.

You can install an ad blocker in it, so it's automatically better than Chrome.

With that and a few cookie popup removers, it's almost like the web is usable again.

Toribor , 3 months ago

Firefox on Android is great. I migrated that first before I actually migrated back to Firefox on desktop.

maniac , 3 months ago

Using use daily. Only problem I sometimes have is the inability to upload images, so I just use duckduckgo's browser

DrQuickbeam , 3 months ago

I recently made the switch. Make sure to install whatever add-ons you need, turn on the "open links in apps" setting, and turn on the "pull to refresh" setting. Import your bookmarks and you can still use the Android password manager. It's not 100% as smooth, but it's pretty close.

DrQuickbeam , 3 months ago

The main problems I have with it now are sometimes there are still issues with loading between browser and apps. Like it might open multiple tabs trying to open an app, and it leaves the app redirect pages open in your tabs list. Additionally, sometimes (like 3% of the time) website scaling doesn't always work, especially on older sites or those made with janky CMS's, and I've also rarely had problems with some dynamic content like inline forms and graphs.

rob_t_firefly , 3 months ago

Firefox on Android is fine, except they insist upon disabling about:config on the main branch of the browser for some damn stupid reason. You have to use a nightly or beta build to be trusted with your own config that much.

Personally, I ended up switching to the Fennec fork over this.

markpaskal , 3 months ago

Its ok but I regularly have to swipe the app away and re open it when it displays a blano screen instead of the website.

Thermal_shocked , 3 months ago

with ublock origin plugin, it's amazing

Delusion6903 , 3 months ago

It is my default. I use ublock and Dark Background Light Text extensions. And the reader view is better than any chromium phone browser.

bitwolf , 3 months ago

It's great but they are two, reported, bugs that annoy me.

First, it sometimes gets stuck half way between dark and light mode.

Second, sometimes it gets stuck starting to load a page. The webciew gets stuck but not the chrome. If you switch tabs the same page will appear. If you enter a new page it will never load.
A force close fixes it but it's annoying.

Using beta is imperative since it enables add-ons . However the bugs are also in stable.

Sheldan , 3 months ago

I am, sometimes there is an issue with videos in Fullscreen, where the video plays just somewhere to the top and off screen, besides that it's fine.

Yankee_Self_Loader , 3 months ago

You guys switched away from Firefox?

DrQuickbeam , 3 months ago

Switched away to Vivaldi and Opera on desktop years ago due to better design and ability to swap between workspaces. Trying to migrate back to Firefox for ethical reasons. Desktop design still lags behind but privacy is great.

CH3DD4R_G0BL1N , 3 months ago

Been with the fox since before the quantum update. I never realized it was as obscure as it apparently is.

amorpheus , 3 months ago

It wasn't, popularity waned slowly over the years.

odelik , 3 months ago

Years ago Firefox had a massive memory leak that would wind up crashing FX randomly or just crushing your system resources. The bug persisted for years. and I swirched to Chrome to get away from that poor experience. A few years back, a random community contributer, that was also fed up, dug in and fixed several issues responsible for the leaks. I remeber thinking that I should give FX a go again, but didn't until relatively recently.