Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.
Brave goes out of its way to make money by ripping off publishers.
As a publisher myself, I respect ad blockers. If they block ads, they aren't gonna click the ads in the first place, so it's their choice. I even respect DNT header and not put my pixel tracking for the users.
Brave, on the other hand, is doing these sneaky stuff to earn from my efforts. A site that has Alexa rank hovering 10,000 accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads.
Thats not how it works. The user receives BAT for opting into OS notification tray ads. Then the user is tipping your blog with their earnings. It may be somewhat of a moot argument, but there is a distinction. The user is accumulating BAT from having the browser open, not necessarily when they are on your site.
Whether Google is intentionally degrading their performance in Firefox or simply doesn't care is an interesting technical detail, but from a practical standpoint I need to use these sites for my job, so I also need to keep a chromium-based browser around.
So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup.
Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services.
If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates.
Nope. When something doesnt work in my FF then good bye. I cant be bothered to do extra work like switching browsers for to support their incompetence. It'been rare though.
TBH the only sites where I have noticed this are Google sites like Hangouts and YouTube. But even those work fine, they just seem to use quite a lot more CPU than I think they should. I do have Chrome as a backup in case something doesn't work, but I can't remember the last time I had to use that.
I can't seem to find bromite on fdroid. Why it not there anymore?
The only cases that I couldn't trace back to an extension were: 1. a major news site thinking Firefox was in incognito mode, and refusing to display any contents. 2. Google Stadia
I find it odd that one of Firefox's only features, over Chrome, is privacy, but they're funded by Google who is the anti-hero right now in the privacy space.
If Firefox's mission is successful they would lose all their funding.
According to the links, the "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate visitor statistics. Furthermore they note that they negotiated a special contract with Google to only collect a subset of data.
There's nothing indirect about Google cutting checks directly to Mozilla.
However, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for about five years and have been very happy with it -- especially post Quantum. I can't even remember the last time I've had to switch to Chromium because something wasn't working.
The pocket thing isn't that bad, it's legitimately just a free cloud sync bookmarking service that you can use, or not. It's basically an extension of FF Sync, and no one has problems with that.
The Mr Robot plugin catastrophe was abhorrent, I certainly won't deny that.
You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users.
But it took quantum to get users back.
Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks.
E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere.
It comes default on android helps.
I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point.
What a shame it happened in the first place though.
There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.
I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues.
At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...
It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken.
An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it.
And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.
1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc
2. Firefox doesn't support media keys.
Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732
3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over.
#3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.
- media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled
- dom.media.mediasession.enabled
#1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works.
The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down.
Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time.
I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.
Nice! Thank you. :)
Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum.
Network inspector says Firefox is spending 150-270ms "blocked" before it even initiates the connection. On Chrome the block is 3-18ms (15-50x (!!) faster).
There's also UI lag. When I press Ctrl+N, I expect a new window to open immediately. Chrome and Chromium based browsers do that. I cannot even perceive the delay between pressing Ctrl+N and a new window appearing. With Firefox it takes about 0.5-1 seconds before anything happens at all. This seems to be another 10-20x difference (though I'd have to record my screen and measure the difference).
Curiously, Re: UI lag, I think the actual time until the navbar is usable is about the same. But Firefox waits until the whole window is built before it displays it, while Chrome opens the window immediately and fills it in. From a user experience (I do command, I expect feedback) this makes a huge difference.
I switch back to Firefox roughly once a year after reading how fast it's gotten. But I have been disappointed on this front every single time. I want Firefox to succeed, I really do. I am donating to Mozilla every month. But as it is right now, I can't tolerate such lag, for a trivial action I perform thousands of times a day.
How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info.
FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.
So once the page is loaded, JS performance seems to be about on par, but page loads are faster in Chrome.
To measure I just used dev tools. But there is quite a lot of randomness involved -- sometimes the engine scheduling planets align, and sometimes they are way out of alignment. You'd need thousands of samples or more to get an accurate reading. I just refreshed a few times to get ballpark numbers.
From pressing enter to the browser initiating a fetch was around 16ms.
Personalization is super important (in any software), it's a shame that in general, it's not being the focus of most of them.
I prefer fast stable bugfree chromium
The experience was incredibly sub par on Android. I tried browsing a video heavy subreddit, and FF just hung (well, all videos stopped playing, which is what I was there for).
I want to use it, but if it can't manage my base use case, I can't warrant it.
I will try again one day, I'm sure.
But, from my perspective, just having uBlock Origin installed in the extensions is a huge differentiator, that gives most pages a lot of speedup. Stylus can also be helpful to fix some suboptimal mobile designs.
Then there's absolutely infuriating stuff like the address bar and tabs disappearing when scrolling, which is fine, but it can be really fucking annoying trying to get it to show up again. It doesn't respond properly, sometimes I'll have to scroll back up a whole page before it does anything and all I wanted to do was switch tabs, so I have to scroll back down when I come back. Makes me want to punch an FF developer.
You could always make it not to hide when scrolling. I btw use gestures to switch tabs via an extension, works great.
At home? FF all the way, plus the usual bevy of ad blockers and PiHole.
In 2018, Mozilla surreptitiously installed a mysterious plugin named Looking Glass to every installed browser as part of a marketing deal with the Mr. Robot TV show. Thus plugin altered websites for an alternate reality game promoting the show.
Back in 2017 Firefox Focus, one of their iOS efforts marketed as being about user privacy, collected telemetry and sent it to Adjust GMBH, a tracking/analytics company based in Germany.
Also in 2017 Firefox integrated a Cliqz plugin to recommend content in the searchbar based on your browsing history, which was sent to the Cliqz servers and theoretically anonymized. Cliqz GMBH is another German company involved in analytics/tracking, and a notoriously scummy one to boot.
I mean, I could go on. Mozilla's hands ain't clean, they make mistakes, but at least their _manifesto_ is worthy.
Pull to reload, tab accessibility, and other performance and rendering oddities need to be fixed before I switch back.
I'm happy with Firefox on Linux though.
Personally, Chromium crashes too often to rely on it.
Its miserable, you can't quite see how badly optimized it is on a high end phone because the page load time is 1/4 second instead of 1/10 of a second. On a low end phone that becomes 2-3 seconds rather than 1/2 a second.
A lot of the web doesn't officially support Firefox anymore (Groupon, Airbnb, my organization).
pretty much nobody use brave on desktop
It's a perfect storm of drama, centered around a browser that has a very small market share from what I can tell (otherwise I'd probably find it all less amusing.)
Chromium was never intentionally limiting any APIs to prevent ad-blockers. I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion, although I get some of the frustration, especially when their main stream of revenue is advertising.
I personally don't use Firefox because it doesn't work as well on modern Linux. Chromium supports Wayland much better. I get weird artifacts on Firefox when running in Sway on Wayland, especially when switching between full-screen and split. Additionally, I still don't believe Firefox properly handles video hardware acceleration and Chromium does on my distro using the native package manager.
Both browsers could benefit from separating their solutions into open source protocols, for example bookmarks, password, and other sync services. This way syncing is done at file-system level like gopass-bridge and Browserpass. GPGme already has an app called gpgme-json for app integration. That way people can use Syncthing, Nextcloud, or whatever preferred cloud-sync solution. I know Firefox has tried building it's own password manager into Firefox, and Chromium has half-assed this as well, but the tools are already there they could just adopt and would provide a much safer and better overall experience.
These platforms and engineers should feel a duty to innovate—not for the sake of a paycheck, company directive, or personal enrichment—but for the community to have a piece of software that is a message of freedom. When they send URLs to remote services by default for safe search, network prediction, etc. they aren't free. When they implement their own centralized sync solution, but make it difficult for you to implement a decentralized or locally-hosted sync solution, then they aren't free. When advertisers are able to use supported JavaScript to port scan your computer, track every pixel movement, and track you around the web; then the software isn't free and neither are you.