Firefox FTW!
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Yes, but only begrudgingly.
Same... I know it's better and worth supporting, I just don't like using it for some reason.
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...
Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)
There's ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird won't even have an alpha til 2026.
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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.
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.
Nah, Firefox is way better.
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.
Naturally, the browser that receives way less funding has less Dev work available.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks! I had no idea this setting existed and it will make Firefox so much more practical for me to use.
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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.
You can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available
I’m happy that they give an option but goddamn would it kill them to have the safe option as the default for once?
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.
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Amazing, I'll give that a shot
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.
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
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.
Windows 10
Same on MacOS
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."
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LibreWolf
Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.
I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/
There's maybe a handful where I'm not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it's technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There's not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.
I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there's also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.
Can anyone explain how much control Google has over the Chromium project?
Look into "Ungoogled Chromium" if you want the browser without all the Google crap.
That's still not free from Google's control of the chromium web engine
It's unfortunately a relatively complex thing to answer.
First off, there's the license. The source code is published under a BSD-3 license, which is very permissive, meaning in theory, anyone could fork the repository and be completely free from any control of Google.
However, this is not really a thing in reality.
First of all, for your fork to have any meaning at all, you need people to use it. They're not going to use your fork, if it's unclear whether you're trustworthy and in particular, you need to offer something better than Google and do so for a while, so that people feel like they can rely on you.
In particular, Google is not bound by its license to make future updates available under the same license. If your fork would become too successful, they could re-license and then it would genuinely just become a competition for who has more dev power.
But with the caveat that if you don't also re-license, then Google can continue taking your work and provide theirs on top.
In particular, Google also has a load of tracking infrastructure and an ad business, which makes Chrome a valuable investment for them.
There's very few other organizations for which it would make sense to invest similarly much into Chromium development (and those organizations will then have similarly awful motivations).
Which means a hard fork, i.e. without dependence on future updates from Google, is pretty much not going to happen.
You also need a solid number of users in your fork, if you want to have any say in terms of web standards. So long as Google Chrome has a majority of users, Google can easily introduce proprietary standards, which webdevs will gladly lap up.
So, all in all, Google does have a pretty tight grip. Presumably, they don't put any incriminating stuff into Chromium, so that they steer clear of even faint attempts to fork (and because they can just put those into Google Chrome instead). But there's plenty room for interpretation in most web standards, so they can implement them in their interest, and then the forks have to stick to that implement, if they want to remain compatible with the web.
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Download Firefox/ Look inside/ Still Firefox.
Download thunderbird/ Look inside/ Older Firefox.
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I wish there's more Mozilla forks.
Icefox I've heard about and LIbrewolf I use actively.
The latter has frustrations with Video Downloadheper. IDK WTF to do to make it work. Sticks me to fucking Firefox to rip. Icefox recommender said it should work with VDH but they don't really know and I ain't had a chance to work with it.
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Floorp, Waterfox, Mercury, Librewolf, Tor (if that even counts)
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