> I really just don't understand the obsession with Chrome, especially in hacker communities.
Chrome used to be very lightweight, fast and basically unseated IE as the top browser. It got that love because at the time Firefox was bloated and IE had a stranglehold. Chrome was also safer with a process per tab. Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile. Chrome (and Safari) or Webkit pushed HTML5/Canvas/WebGL/SVG into real world use which changed the landscape of browsers.
Nowadays Chrome is bloated like Firefox was, has a stranglehold like IE did, is now pushing its own market standards and breaking existing open/market standards and generally being a forceful, non respecting to standards, web browser. It sure is unfortunate and another sign that bizdev/marketing/executives rule over engineers at Google now.
Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.
> Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
> Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile.
This is the big one for me. When I'm not developing I actually prefer to use Safari-- I like it's interface better and it feels more at home in macOS. It's "good enough" too.
What I'm really a user of is the Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox's are looking quite solid lately but I just haven't switched over.
What I'd love is to have Firefox dev tools functionality in Chrome.
Firefox highlights the edge lines of the selected element automatically, and in all directions (if I recall correctly). I have to use an extension – VisBug – to achieve that in Chrome.
There's also the fonts window, which lets you in on what fonts are used on the page, and lets you modify the selected element's font settings – size, weight, slant/italic etc.. I pay a lot of attention to typography, so that part is important to me.
There's plenty to like about Firefox, like the Awesome Bar, has better bookmarking, is able to handle a huge number of tabs, has the "Multi-Account Containers" extension (with its offspring, e.g. "Facebook Container"), or the "Tree Style Tab" extension, just to name a few.
Also that it's not Chrome or based on Chromium is reason alone to like Firefox, because we need diversity for healthy web standards. That Chromium is open source is a red herring and open standards are more important.
I know developers have been preferring Chrome and for good reasons, but I've switched back to Firefox for the last 3 years and personally I find it hard to use Chrome these days, because Firefox has a better UI.
The only downside is that Chrome's dev tools still has some capabilities that Firefox lacks, but Firefox has been improving a lot, as you have seen.
1. I never asked for any of that response, nor did the situation imply that I needed to learn about the points stated to make a better decision.
2. There's a general passive-combative conversation about browsers going on ("I like Firefox, I don't get why people like Chrome" and vice versa) that I never wanted to be a part of, mostly because of how disrespectful and counterproductive it is.
3. In a thread about ad-blocking, I got what is effectively an ad for Firefox.
I don't want any of this nonsense on my side of the table. "Use my product because I value it!" No, go away, I don't need this.
My choices are rarely uninformed. I spend time considering what to pick where I'm able to. I'd like my choices to be respected as such – not have my face plastered with someone else's unprompted opinion.
Here's an example of a better conversation:
– I liked this part of Firefox, and I wish it was in Chrome too.
– Do you not like Firefox whole, then? If so, why?
– Because of X, Y, and Z. I used it intensely for a month or so, so I got a good look at the way it behaves. I know X is solvable, but not Y or Z (I tried), and they're critical to my browsing experience.
– Okay, I see. I hope you consider (browser diversity, or whatever issues using Firefox's supposed to solve), because they're important.
– Oh yeah? Can you tell me why?
...and so on. A respectful conversation that sparks curiosity and provides context, without annoying any of the parties in the process.
Otherwise, you get what you give. Seems a fair approach to me.
Nobody here is nearly as combative as you. Look up projection.
You'd like your choices to be respected, but you are incapable of offering civility. Is that also a choice we should respect, or is it beyond your control?
And didn't get to this spot on any kind of technical or feature merits, but essentially by relentless nagging on the Google search page to have users install it. Sure, devs/geeks etc were eager early adopters, but the bulk of users were steered this way by Google.
I got the "love", because it was (and still is) advertised on google.com. Most non-technical people readily install malware when prompted. If malware is advertised on google.com, they will install it more quickly.
Microsoft have been stalling IE development for years, which allowed Mozilla to gain huge marketshare. This resulted in a lot of people learning, how to install a third party web browser. By the time Chrome was unveiled, Mozilla have coincidentally slowed Firefox development to a crawl. I remember the point, when the stable Firefox version was close to unusable, while everyone technologically proficient used a development release. It have been so bad, that some addons simply recommended not using the stable Firefox version. Btw, things have only gotten worse since then.
Chrome's dazzling success is result of it's aggressive advertising as well as sabotage and mismanagement, that killed off alternatives.
I feel the same. I keep Chrome around, though, because it seems to be the new IE in the sense that I frequently encounter sites that simply don't work properly in either WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers. It's also the new IE in the sense that I get incessant reminders about how I should be using Chrome when I access Google-administrated services, which feels like a surprisingly blatant if still implicit admission on their part that an open web simply isn't a concern or interest of theirs. I never really believed otherwise, but still.
Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
> While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
The Temporary Containers was a nice add-on built on top of that.[0] While it's a pain in the aspect of cookie-use across domains (like logging into Azure), it's other features out-weigh the initial nuissance - like automatic deletion of the container, as soon as the last one for that particular domain is closed. All of this is, of course, configurable.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
They're a nice feature, although after a long while of trying, I ended up using just the Facebook container. The main container extension felt like too much work in regular browsing, and the tracking protection seems otherwise adequate when combined with uBlock.
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
That's because you weren't properly setup with containers. I have 4 sessions going on right now, without any manual intervention. Facebook, work, Google and default. All interacting as intended with their assigned domains as isolated sessions.
They do have some parts that are Firefox-exclusive. This is an easy advantage to have over your competition practically for free. I hope they see that.
A major problem is also that google websites run like crap in firefox. Gmail takes 20 seconds to load and don't get me started on youtube studio. Even the "feedback" button is broken in firefox so I can't even report the bugs I find.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
Plus Chrome just works better for a lot of sites. That might be because the site isn't properly coded, but users don't care. They just want something that works and more often than not, that's Chrome.
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
In a couple of projects I'm currently working on, the CSS for them was causing me problems between the 2 browsers. Willing to admit that I don't have an intimate familiarity with CSS best practices. I look up what I think I'm trying to do, and then implement what I've found. I primarily use Firefox while I'm coding, and then only check with Chrome and Safari periodically. I've had to circle back to fix CSS issues specifically for WebKit not rendering as expected. Eventually, I can get to something that works across all the browsers I have access (no Android devices anywhere).
It's the same for Gmail, but this isn't Firefox at fault. It's Google doing this on purpose by using the old, experimental, non-standard ShadowDOM V0 API, which only Chrome supports, and then using that across its products to break non-Chrome based browsers. Please don't reward them by using Chrome just because of this. That only shows them that such abusive behavior works.
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing that information. I never did use Chrome other than testing it out for less than a day, finding issues with various sites and uninstalling it. Firefox instead since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left. Never had a real problem with it.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
Enough people use Gmail and YouTube that maybe it would make sense for Firefox to add support for ShadowDOM V0 API? It might not be a W3C standard, but if Google uses it heavily then it's a defacto standard.
They could, except that would effectively show Google that it can dictate what other browsers implement, alter its products on rapid basis to regularly break them etc. and at that point there's almost no point to an alternative, since we'd we're fully back in the IE era again, which is why I don't think it's a good idea.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
Firefox doesn't have the market share to push back on Google. The best way for Firefox to grow is to make the best browser from the user's perspective.
I get that, but this seems like controlled opposition.
Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.
Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.
Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.
If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.
> IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of my experience. I browse solely on Firefox and don't encounter sites which only work on Chrome at all (at least as far as I can remember right now). I wonder what's different between our browsing habits that's causing this.
I was doing some work with very large data sets in Google Sheets last week. I started hitting row and cell limits. Personally, I think a database is more appropriate for what I was doing, but spreadsheets are more grokable by non-techies.
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Is that really relevant? I'd be happy if you could point me to a more capable tool. Zoho and Excel Online have never really made it onto my radar, but if they perform better in this situation I'd check them out. A lot of people are tied to the constraints they have.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
> Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
It's a pretty standard Firefox installation (I also tried disabling uBlock and resetting my privacy settings), and I just confirmed the user agent looks normal, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0. I think it broke when I moved last week from one EU country to another. Why that would make a difference, I don't know, but Adidas is now serving me WEBP images in Firefox 64 regardless of my browser settings, whether I clear cookies, use a private window, or choose different regional versions of the website.
So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.
I was working on my taxes last weekend and I hit a bunch of them. ADP, the 401K and FSA provider sites, Aetna, and a 529 saving plan site are all ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Firefox does not stack tabs like Chrome does and does not load all the restored session tabs at once either. Aren't these dumb design decisions enough to switch to a product where people actually think about how it's going to be used?
also, if you use Autodiscard plugin, you will find that FF use less RAM and Ru. more faster. Essentially discard and suspend tabs that you aren't using.
Laying all the trans at one cripples my core i8 system for some time. Firefox's lazy tab loading is a much better user experience. Together with TreeStyle Tabs and the recent multi-container add-on, Firefox is just a better experience.
I used to be a fanatic about tree style tabs, but due to the new api, it's unusable with containers. I recently switched over to vertical tabs for that reason. I miss the tree layout, but at least now my tabs maintain their ordering.
I'm sure you're aware that not every user will have the same experience with a piece of software. There are a couple of bugs referenced in the Github issues for TST relevant to containers. There is a workaround, but I experience the issue again within a half hour. Not worth it to me.
Alright, it's just that the phrasing - blaming it on the new API - made it sound like an inherent flaw that would affect everyone, which definitely isn't right.
I use Chromium on linux because Firefox doesn't have touch-screen support and smooth-scrolling feels a little rough. I wont hesitate to switch over if these changes are made though.
+100 This is the first setting I change on a new Linux laptop install.
You can also disable smooth scrolling only for the touchpad in about:config to keep the animation for scrolling with the keyboard. Search for "smooth"; I think it's the mouseWheel one, but I'm not at home to verify.
I find the touchscreen support to be pretty good with Fedora's patches running on Wayland. I think these patches are slated for upstreaming, so get excited!
Disclaimer: I contribute to Firefox and enjoy it quite a bit.
Chrome is still the best performing browser (even if it's a resource hog).
I tried using Firefox for Linux for about 6 months last year, but had to give up. I got frustrated with the random UI pauses/latency, random crashes, and broken web rendering (not its fault). On the other hand, Chrome just works, and provides a very smooth, low latency experience on Linux. I don't like that I have to give up my privacy for a decent browsing experience on Linux, but that's the state of things.
Yeah, it's totally anecdotal and just my experience. I would really like to use Firefox. I may try it again. Quantum made such a big improvement on Linux which is why I gave it a shot and stuck with it so long. But it still had issues for me.
Hmm...that is super strange then. Intel has definitely been the most solid for me when it comes to GPU stability, including in Firefox. I primarily use a workstation with an AMD GPU, but have a secondary laptop with Intel and had no issues with Firefox there whatsoever. I am also on Arch. The only time I ever experienced frequent crashes was when I was testing the Wayland build early on, (they still happen sometimes on Wayland, which is still experimental in Firefox, but on X things have been solid for me).
I am honestly perplexed what the issue could be then, I was sure you were using an NVidia with the proprietary drivers or something like that, as such setups have caused me trouble in the past.
The only thing is I wouldn't recommend turning on WebRender for everything yet, but it's not on by default so I doubt you had it on.
I'm currently running the experimental branch of Firefox on Linux and IMO things have improved a lot since then. I had similar issues, especially with tabs that crashes / get stuck when watching 3 or 4 twitch streams. With the latest releases almost all has gone away (cant remember any crashed tabs in the last few months).
The dev console is better than Firefox one. It's faster. Minimalistic interface is great. HOWEVER - Firefox console is catching up. Firefox is fast enough. Chrome is getting more and more bloated and interface is starting to suck compared to initial version of Chrome. Now they're trying to do stupid things and promote ads more and more. It gets worse every day and hopefully, they'll screw up to the point it dies. I loved Google before, now I'm disliking them as much as I do Facebook. I root for Firefox, but it's still not there yet.
Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.
It's still slower than other platforms but it's much faster than it used to be. I've been using Firefox exclusively on OS X / macOS for a year. The only problem I've seen is that it sometimes uses more CPU than is reasonable, which often appears to be due to Gmail's terrible implementation.
I've always wondered how Chrome and Firefox password storage fare in safety. Are they both equality trustworthy? Are the encryption technologies comparable?
Firefox has this in nightly too (possibly only in US). It's been there a while and works well, I don't know why it hasn't moved on from nightly, to be honest...
I've been using 1Password for years now, and it has extensions for both browsers. Now I'm portable and not locked into a single browser. I had a friend nag me for a long time because I was too lazy to try it out. Once I did, I have never regretted it.
That's really how I feel about all browsers since Opera did a U-turn and re-made their product into a Chrome clone. Firefox can get quite close with a bunch of add-ons, but not enough.
I'm invested in the Google ecosystem, and have recently got myself a Pixel Slate that I carry everywhere as my primary computing/ media device (no more separate laptop and tablet). It would now be silly of me to use Firefox in place of Chrome. Moreover I have got nothing to hide, so all these privacy-fears don't concern me; in fact I often feel like they are being overblown.
I'm sure you believe that's true, but I suggest that your belief is based on a certain confidence that the people pouring through your data are fundamentally acting in good, or at worse neutral faith.
However, if this data ever gets into the hands of someone acting in bad faith, even the most innocent behaviour can be weaponized against you. Let's say, for example, that you are wrongly suspected of committing a crime, and the investigating police are more interested in cooking up a conviction than determining if you actually did it.
All sorts of details about your life can be leaked and "spun" to make you look very, very bad. You went to a bar on a certain evening? So did these known crime figures. Were you meeting them?
You spend time on Hacker News. HACKER NEWS. You could find yourself the target of a smear campaign designed to turn public sentiment against you.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."—Cardinal Richelieu
If you hand over your data without hesitation to a nation-state or to powerful and unscrupulous corporations, I believe you will discover that there is no such thing as "nothing to hide."
People who feel that they have “nothing to hide” don’t quite understand the extent to which they’re being mined for personal data. Google offers all of this amazingly polished software for free so naive people like you will feed them your browsing history, email, location and search queries. They will then monetize that data by targeting ads to you, which generates over 80% of their revenue.
If you are ok with that and still think you have nothing to hide, ask yourself if you’d be ok with this trove of data ever being exposed publicly.
Ever googled something embarrassing? Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
Sent a very personal email?
Visited a less than savory location, or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
I did a factory reset on my Android phone today and was depressed when I realized the vast number of settings I have to change in order to get even a small semblance of privacy. App permissions, location history, disabling of default apps; the list goes on.
> ask yourself if you’d be ok with [your browsing history, email, location and search queries] ever being exposed publicly.
I already did, and the answer was "Yes, I'd be okay" (although the likelihood of that happening is extremely rare).
> Ever googled something embarrassing?
Use incognito mode.
> Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
I have only one medical condition, which I'm not embarassed to talk about publicly (I already do it).
> Sent a very personal email?
I rarely send "very personal"/ intimate information over email in lieu of just talking over phone.
> Visited a less than savory location,
Never in my life.
> or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I never had to do it (why would I?).
> I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
If--note "if"--I were to engage in an activity that could potentially be used to blackmail or harm me in any way, I would of course be doing it in as private manner as possible. However it would be silly to spend the rest of my normal life cowering and being phobic to technological advances.
> Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
You confuse being naive (in its original sense of the word) with being ignorant. But I guess that's what fear does to one.
Yes, they are likely tracking users in incognito mode. You're still loading google analytics or doubleclick resources on many, many sites. Merely making that request (or any request to a google property) gives them your IP which is static enough to identify a household or corporate complex based on previously gathered data. From there these javascript libs phone home every bit of data they can from your browser, including UA string/browser minor version, plugins, resolution (fingerprinting). This can further narrow things down to an individual device you have used before, especially if you're just popping in and out of incognito.
Google also operates some of the most popular DNS services 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 which can capture domains you query from your IP.
There are various measures you can go through to stop this to some degree, like DNS blocking, client-side ad/tracker blocking, VPNs etc. but to go all-out is very cumbersome and I'm not convinced that it would even be 100% effective. Google's business DEPENDS on collecting your data and tracking you, and they are very, very good at it. I highly recommend reading "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism".
This is a flawed study by a Google's competitor (the for-profit organization called DuckDuckGo). FTA:
> Following the study’s publication this morning, Google told The Verge in a statement that it found the methodology flawed and the findings misleading. “This study’s methodology and conclusions are flawed since they are based on the assumption that any difference in search results are based on personalization. That is simply not true,” a Google spokesperson said. “In fact, there are a number of factors that can lead to slight differences, including time and location, which this study doesn’t appear to have controlled for effectively.”
It is a shame that you are being downvoted. I (like a lot of people here) disagree with you, but you have a point of view shared by a lot of people. It's an important point of view to consider and engage with because my impression is that it's the majority view from the population - based on their actions, they don't care about their data privacy if it gets them gmail for free.
For a lot of people they possibly hold that view due to a lack of understanding about the situation, but some people like you understand the situation and still are OK with it. That's an entirely reasonable point of view which should be eagerly debated with.
> It is a shame that you are being downvoted. I (like a lot of people here) disagree with you, but you have a point of view shared by a lot of people.
People are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest. I recall reading a forum, where a guy asked for medical advice, because he was diagnosed with fibrosis (his lungs basically got scarred all over). His work required him to continuously inhale toxic exhaust, and he wanted a way to avoid further health complications (but keep a work!) because "the pay was good".
Fibrosis causes you to cough non-stop and significantly increases probability of dying from lung infection. Compared to that, using Google's products does not result in any visible long-term effects on health. Therefore, it is natural to conclude, that using Google's sites and services is safe, healthy and should be widely encouraged. It does not matter, that Google uses anti-competitive practices to monopolize market, restrict user freedom and lead us to future, when we won't be able to refuse shoehorned "services", shoved in our face, right?
Please stop with those creepy "understanding" antics. Encouraging self-harm is bad, and wishing to view advertisements is definitely a form of self-harm.
You are essentially deciding for me that what I choose to do with my technological choices is "a form of self-harm" (when in fact I only experience total pleasure).
Is it really that hard to comprehend that, when one does not share the alarmist feelings of the crowd, they will make intelligent choices based on personal preferences?
Don't mean to insult you, and some people just have an easier time opening up about everything, but a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
> a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Ever familiar with the phrase "un unexamined life is not worth living"? Here, of course, the thing to be examined is your belief that a life with nothing whatsover to hide is limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
What about his address, and his family and friends' addresses, as well? What about his income, where he works, the time he leaves for work and the time that he gets back? And the street he grew up on and his mother's maiden name?
Chrome is deeply integrated in ChromeOS devices (should be obvious from the naming), of which the Pixel Slate is what I own. A bunch of PWAs (arguably the future of android apps) also require Chrome.
Moreover I use Chrome to sync my Google account, including passwords (which I can't live without) and browsing history.
This is an excellent point. There is absolutely no way a browser which loads and executes ad-loading and tracking script can be possibly be faster than one that doesn't.
Yeah, even with all the speed increases from the rewrite, Firefox still feels awkward and slow at times when compared to Safari and Chrome. Every time I decide to try and switch over from Safari, I get pages where scroll performance is a lot slower than what I'm used to and then I get bothered by it and switch back.
It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
Note that the WebRender can only be enabled in the Firefox Nightly channel. To confirm that it's working, flip the pref, restart Firefox Nightly, and then search for "WebRender" in about:support.
WebRender does work on macOS (and Android and maybe Linux), but Mozilla is prioritizing a Windows MVP first (because something like 90% of Firefox users are on Windows). Work on macOS, Linux, and Android will then resume.
> I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
Yet how long will we have it if everyone keeps using excuses to continue using Chrome?
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