Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it's now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though...

[–] casmael@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)

[–] eatham@aussie.zone 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird won't even have an alpha til 2026.

[–] mke@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

And to make matters more complicated,

Servo, as far I know, has no plans to be a browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chrome rendering engine), so that other software can be made with it. This seems to be a common misconception.
Ladybird's project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that some would prefer to avoid supporting.

I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren't Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation's tough.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.

The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable "sponsored bookmarks" upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search...

All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.

Sure the enshittification isn't anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it's happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.

Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.

[–] ours@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox's AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don't need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.

Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.

There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don't want it.

I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Nah, Firefox is way better.

[–] original_reader@lemm.ee 0 points 3 months ago

I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.

That said, I still use Firefox in most cases.

[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Different profiles on Firefox are nowhere near Chrome.

I'm still going to use FF, but there are areas it lags behind Chrome. That's the only big one for me.

[–] Daxtron2@startrek.website 0 points 3 months ago

Naturally, the browser that receives way less funding has less Dev work available.

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I just wish Firefox updates weren't so intrusive. Having it hit me with "Firefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefox" while I'm trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesn't save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I won't go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Amazing, I'll give that a shot

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I’m happy that they give an option but goddamn would it kill them to have the safe option as the default for once?

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it's far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.

[–] bl7hbl7h@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Or batch update some of your apps with Patch My PC Home Updater

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Ah. I guess I don't notice that since I'm on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.

If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you won't auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.

[–] asexualchangeling@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago

I legitimately forgot this used to happen to me on Windows, it's so convenient being able to update all the software on my system with the click of a button

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Thanks! I had no idea this setting existed and it will make Firefox so much more practical for me to use.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago

From what I understand, Chrome doesn't need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.

If you're updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Restart Firefox to let it finish updating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen that says you HAVE to restart right now at this very moment.

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

When it happens, it doesn't let me do anything other than stay on the already loaded webpage without restarting.

Open a new tab > "Restart to continue..."
Click a link > "Restart to continue..."
Type a URL > "Restart to continue..."
and etc

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and I've never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. It's been ages though since I've left FF open for months on end on Linux though.

[–] rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 0 points 3 months ago

I've had this same experience on Linux Mint. I'll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won't load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I'm like, "Dangit, didn't realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox."

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Windows 10

[–] MaXsteri@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Same on MacOS

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

I got it again unfortunately, here's a screenshot of what it looks like