Nobody’s stopping you. Just saying it’s either ignorant or stupid to, and actively makes the internet a worse place.

let people burn tires in their backyard if they feel like it, ffs

but see, they wont. thats the problem.

google/microsoft are circling the wagons and are about to prevent anything but chrome and edge to be 'official browsers'

so, to your point, yes we want everyone to use what they want. but continuing to use chrome will kill the very ecosystem that allows the choice you want to have.

And that is why soon there shall be a monoculture of browser and all control shall be ceded to massive corpo.

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This is the reason why we encurage more people to ditch Chrome, because sites starts to only support this one browser?

We don’t force anyone to everything, we just want more usage so we cannot be forced.

some small problems i face is that

while i use youtube it runs slower.

and the quick image search feature using google lens is not present.

and telegram voice call does not work.

I keep going back and forth with Firefox and Vivaldi. The chrome based browsers just tend to run better. I love firefox on mobile but on desktop it’s tougher for me to stick with. Also Mozilla seems to have a different goal for the future with all the other products and ai weirdness they recently announced.

To be fair, chromebooks are great devices for kids, and the family link platform makes keeping them "secure", easier... a lot easier!!!

I work at a small company - absolutely everything from work macros, accounts and shortcuts are all intertwined in Chrome, they’ve been using it like that for ten years - it’d be faster for me to find a new job then to unclog that mess from the entire office. I still installed firefox for personal use though.

Chrome’s developer tools are better, and having two browsers open at the same time while programming is a strain on RAM resources, especially since Visual Studio Code needs to run in its own Chromium.

Okay I’m happy to switch, I used to use Firefox years ago until Chrome came along and it’s a great browser, but can I integrate my Google accounts with it?

I want it to sync all my stuff to my Google accounts, and so far I’ve not found another browser that can do this :-(

I’m also not sure if all the plugins I have would have Firefox implementations, maybe they do. I use Darkreader, some password vault stuff, uBlock, SponsorBlock and the other YouTube one they make (I forget the name) are an absolute must, too.

Firefox is right there and is a better browser to boot. I genuinely have no idea why

I used to use mozilla by Mozilla, too. THAT’s why.

Serious question. Is it actually better for the typical user? I don’t mean people commenting here. I’m thinking about the majority that don’t care about privacy, blocking ads, quality technology, etc. for those people, I’m guessing that Firefox is equivalent. Just another browser that works fine. So why switch??

Chrome is great at multi-user switching. FF in comparison is @$$ in that respect… I went back to FF around a month ago after a decade long hiatus.

Horses and water

I once commented saying something like, except for work, all Linux users should be using Firefox. And this was the reply. Some people are just fucking hopeless:

“Firefox has only ever been a sometime back-up browser for me…ever since Chrome appeared in 2007. Prior to that, I used it because it was the sole usable alternative to Internet Exploder…

The Mozilla devs, for far too long, spent more time stabbing each other in the back than they did writing code and fixing the tons of problems that were always inherent in the code. It’s the only browser I’ve ever used that used to regularly crash & burn at least a dozen times a day. And ya wonder why people flocked to Chrome?”

Because normies were using IE, then enough of them had their “tech enthusiast” grandson show them Chrome in 2010 and now that’s all they use.

Some websites load faster in Chrome. But the reason why Chrome is so ubiquitous is because for normal people, Google is still the plucky user friendly company they were in the early 00s.

Firefox is better on desktop, but on mobile it still sucks, sometimes it is even refusing to load websites.

As a former chrome user it’s so real. Chrome connects every device for you and once you ARE in the loop it’s hard to leave it. Wanna switch to Firefox? Oops suddenly your authentication doesn’t work anymore. Oh what about those useful Google logins tied to everything now? Good luck with that.

It took me huge effort to switch off chromium based browsers because the longer you use chrome, the more it worms it’s way into all your services making it harder and harder to switch. I still can’t figure out how to seperate my Yahoo account from my Gmail account

A huge reason I left is realising that if google decided I broke their TOS on something like say, YouTube ad blocking, they can just terminate by Google account and every service attached to it suddenly becomes unusable. I’d rather not be taken hostage like that

Edit: for all the wise people in the comments. I was trying to decouple entirely from Google products, not just chrome

We can’t forget that a lot of people have absolutely no idea that this is happening or what it means. Many folks just think the Chrome icon is how you access the internet and have no idea that there are other options. Helping to educate those folks is going to be a significant part of minimizing Chrome’s dominance.

Do you have any examples? I have used Firefox for years and never experienced this, nor heard of anyone I know who uses Firefox experiencing this.

Use a Chromium fork instead if you’re having so much trouble. Thorium is a decent alternative.

If a website or app doesn’t test in Firefox, I avoid it. That’s something I run into like once a year, and I just use edge once if I need to, and avoid that website or app in the future. It’s not hard to support Firefox, it’s just a shitty ass business decision not to

I have had multiple websites just don’t work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put.

Have you tried to change the browser’s user agent ?

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Just another reason to avoid it as much as possible.

I have had multiple websites just don’t work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put.

The exact reason why we encurage to ditch Chrome.

What are you using that makes it crash, virtually never happens to me.

Tab crashes with ublock enabled or without?

If without, it’s probably ads/trackers crashing the tab.

I haven’t seen that happen in possibly two years, let alone regularly.

I use Firefox all day on both Mac and Windows and this rarely happens. It does seem to happen on Linux for me sometimes though.

since netscape navigator here. even used netscape during the dark ages (when aol controlled it).

What features does Vivaldi have that don’t exist in a FF extension?

And using a WebKit based browser is still better than using a chromium fork.

It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That’s not how it (currently) works though.

Arc has floated this idea. Currently Arc is Chromium-based, but they say they’ve designed it to allow for swapping engines in the future.

IIRC, Edge had a similar feature for a while, allowing you to run legacy Internet Explorer tabs if a site required it. Not sure if that still exists.

People saying “just use Firefox” have a very narrow view on how any of this works

No, not at all. I understand perfectly. Your concerns are valid.

Our point is not supporting Chrome is more important in the long run.

There is no front end in the world that will make up for the loss of true ad blocking and everything else Google pushes down the line.

Let’s be clear about this:

I don’t want to tell you to use Firefox. I want to tell you to use whatever you like. I wish we lived in a world where the choice didn’t matter.

But we don’t

When I’m telling people to use firefox, I’m telling them if you have a problem with the direction the internet is going in, you actually have to do something about it beyond just complaining. Support the competition, the only non-profit in the space, and the only true alternative browser left. Because everything is going to get exponentially worse without competition, and we really really need to preserve the one remaining safe refuge.

I tried really hard to use Floorp which fixes most of my problems with stock Firefox but even that just showed me how excellent Vivaldi is compared to other browsers.

Let me add that support for passkeys is becoming more and more important and Firefox doesn’t support passkeys. Yes, it supports forms of WebAuthn (YubiKey and the likes), but not “scan this QR code with your smartphone and use biometric authentication to sign in”.

Writing a new ff UI is pretty easy. The entire UI is written in html at this point. I’m not sure why people would say it’s “hard” to change.

Embedding gecko into something requires work (even that isn’t that hard really, you just have to hand it a gl surface and pass through inputs)

You admit in the opening of your comment that your issue is preference and then go on to say there’s no single universal solution.

There absolutely is a single universal solution. Either adapt your preference and use a different browser until you’re familiar enough with it to prefer it, or adapt your preference to admitting that you don’t care that Google is getting your data more than you care about being ever-so-slightly inconvenienced. It’s pretty simple.

You seem to have very high requirements for a mobile browser. None of this have been an issue for me in years of Firefox mobile. Maybe philosophy is worth a little bit of discomfort.

Counterpoint: uBlock origins.

With Firefox you can put the search bar on the bottom. Checkmate.

Feels like an ad…

honestly I heavily agree, Firefox on android is just a worse and choppier experience and I’d love for it to get a major overhaul to bring it back up to modern standards

I think people would let every company watch them take a shit if it meant they got dark mode on their app…

I couldn’t care less about 120Hz when my privacy is at stake. Even if chrome has per tab isolation, I’m sure Google’s got its mittens in there somewhere.

A second load time difference, meh. Not a big deal to me. Same with materialU

We really need more browser engines floating around.

No don’t

As of now we really only have 3, Webkit, Firefox, and Chromium.

Webkit is the only browser engine in that list; the other 2 are browsers, not engines. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. Chrome/chromium use Blink engine.

tbh i think it would be better if there was a single collaborative engine instead, owned by a non-profit company like The Linux Foundation

maybe the W3C could establish their own but idk if they even do anything these days

Firefox isn’t based on WebKit. Maybe you’re thinking Safari.

Gecko came from Netscape. Webkit came from KHTML. Pretty sure Gecko/Firefox are not Webkit based. Blink is though.

FF has way too much groundwork laid and way too much mindshare currently (especially given the rust language and all…) If, for some reason, thousands of devs just gave up on mozilla, more would continue the path and fork it most likely.

Why use Chrome for Facebook? The Facebook container sufficiently isolates it.

Regulators are blind to this, it’s too technical.

Security? No. Privacy? Of course (assuming you don’t use vanilla FF). Is it much easier to escape the sandbox in Gecko than Chromium. Doesn’t matter what options they give you in the settings titled “Security”.

lmao at the thought of mozilla suing microsoft. Basically no resources vs functionally infinite resources, they would stand no chance at all. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but our legal system is based on a variation of might vs right, we could call it rich vs bitch for convenience

Lineage/Graphene OS for the win

You’re not wrong. One spy is better than 1+x spies, especially if that one spy is well controlled with regulation. Better than bad is still not necessarily good.

Oh, no, no, no, it can look like a good thing, but it’s terrible. If google gets the “spying monopoly”, they will have such power in their hands that they will be able to, alone, to things like manipulate your habits and routine, decide when you should replace your electronics, manipulate elections, markets, and so much more. It can seem, at first, that it would be easier to “just block google and that’s it” or “just let the governments regulate them”, but in reality, they would create a scenario where you couldn’t even browse the web or use simple tech devices without being logged in in a “safety-something compatible device”, while lobbying heavily to do so.

They’re already trying to go that way. With a monopoly, they would simply have no resistance at all.

The only Google thing holding me back from full degoogling is YouTube, but with how garbage the platform is becoming, especially with the algorithm just going berserk and it probably not being long until I start being affected by the adblock-block, I think moving away from it is only going to be easier than ever before.

Or just use Firefox…?

I agree it’s BS, but how do you know they’re “paid off”? What’s an example of one that was “paid off”?

Correct me if I am wrong but arent Apple based browsers all modifications of WebKit/Safari?
Or is it a iOS/iPad OS specific thing and MacOS is actually free from those restrictions by being able to sideload.

FF has always been security conscious and was actually the big dog until around 2007 or so when they had to do a full rebuild of their code and this made it so that a lot of peoples’ favorite plugins stopped working until they were updated. This coincided with when Chrome started to become bigger and people switched. Now people are switching back. I use a combination of FF and Opera GX.

At one point it was the top dog - this was before google was even in the browser market mind you. Then they entered and used a lot of… Shall we say interesting marketing practices to usurp firefoxes dominant position - it wasn’t all due to chrome being better.

What lessons have you learned so far? I’ve switched to FF and DDG with great results, but still use Gmail/android/photos.

i switched to calyx os yesterday and i love it already!

How many google services do you have? I just have one, and if I ever deleted it, all of the google apps I use would become worthless.

You need to have effective replacements.

This is why Apple is so popular… much more thoroughly integrated, in many cases a better product, and for the most part paying more than just lip service to privacy.

About the only Google services I still use is the search engine (while it is still marginally useful), and Maps (since so many people on FB Marketplace also use it, so sending an address using a maps link is the ideal solution).

Please don’t with this tech elitest stuff. Yeah, most people will continue to use chrome because they don’t really understand the gravity of what it means for their privacy, doesn’t mean we can’t do our best to help them out.

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You did so well until the last few sentences. Casually throwing everyone under the bus as idiots isn’t a great move.

To be blunt, there’s a lot of tech noobs out there that have always been, and will always be, fairly bad with technology. There’s an even larger number that can’t be bothered to pay attention or care about it. And finally, there’s the enthusiasts and the tech savvy, most of whom are working in a tech related field (or want to). Special shout out to the enthusiasts who don’t work in a tech field who are still quite savvy. But let’s face it, the enthusiasts and the tech savvy are a minority. We are not their targets. Fact is, even if you’re using Google’s various services or Chrome or whatever, the tech literate are at least aware of what’s happening, and a nontrivial number of them are here. Including you and I.

It then becomes our job to save others from themselves and get them away from the products looking to harm them. Throwing in the towel and calling everyone neaderthals isn’t the way to accomplish this. If we all do our part, we can save those we care about from becoming yet another battery in the machine, with all their data flowing through one company. It’s our duty.

For those that REALLY want to help, get involved in local politics and be the change. Help push regulation on the corporate shills that want it all. Whether that’s running for office, or contacting your local representative or whatever, it’s something that should be done. They shouldn’t be allowed to just implement, what is essentially mass surveillance on the world without someone doing something about it. That’s what the government is supposed to be there to do. I’ll reserve my comments about how effective they’ve been in the past or how corrupt the whole system is, because that will vary from country to country. But bluntly, you can be that change by getting involved.

As to the comments about the general idiocy of the population of earth, I say this: do you know it all? Well, neither do they. Nobody does. Can you fix your car and then turn around and frame a shed from scratch? Me neither. Can you perform experiments to discover new and exciting things in quantum physics, then build a toaster from raw materials? Me neither. Can you fix your plumbing, then create a program in Pascal that does your taxes for you? Me neither. Everyone has their skills, talents and expertise. Simply because there is a large percentage of people whose expertise is not tech, doesn’t, and shouldn’t, invalidate their intelligence as an individual.

Check yourself, or the next time you have a problem you don’t know how to fix, people might just throw in the towel on helping you.

May I ask what specific CVE and when your professional told you that?

A Cybersecurity professional once told me that Firefox is frowned upon

This has been rampant for years now.

There was a massive movement years ago to get every user on Chrome. Even going so far as to replace all appearances of IE with Chrome, then change the Chrome desktop icon to the IE icon, then tell the users it’s a new better version of IE.

What is a CVE?

Opera gx the only browser for gamers its advertised on YouTube so you know it’s good

No idea what you’re taking about, but I never had any issues translating sites with Firefox. Even Japanese or the likes.

translating like chrome

What?

So nothing will change 😅

Google recently revised that motto, it now has a comma after the first word.

Switched to it recently, have been absolutely loving it! No regrets!

There are a couple tiny issues I have with it that drive me nuts (namely: 1 how they implement the CSS blur filter sucks and 2 the fact that they haven’t implemented page transitions even though I think it was their idea to start with (?))

But other than those things, I certainly don’t feel like I’m missing anything by ditching Google.

I have to restart it once or twice each day as it refuses to play videos or audio after a while. I know it’s not a settings or add-on issue, and I searched everywhere for an explanation. It fucking sucks. I’m this close to going back to Chrome.

Firefox is a great browser, but the people that advocate for it can be insufferable at times.

Lemmy is FOSS and largely used by anticapitalist tech nerds (I say this positively). Chrome is one of the most significant monopolies in tech. I don’t know why you wouldn’t expect this to be a common topic.

You have an alternative?

you can do this within gmail and also using the multi account containers in firefox

Yes you can. With container tabs.

Yes you can. With Firefox containers.

Not only do I do that, I have also created separate desktop icons for each Firefox profile

Since nobody linked it, here you go: support.mozilla.org/…/how-use-firefox-containers

It’s actually super useful.

I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.

Does Simple Tab Groups do the trick?

ah! you’re looking for this :)

You have a couple options, as others have mentioned: multiple browser profiles and container tabs. The profiles don’t work quite as well as in Chrome because switching between them isn’t as convenient. Besides that, it’s the same thing. Container tabs is where it’s at. With those, you can use multiple profiles in the same window and set up rules to open certain sites in specific containers. Also check out the Simple Tab Groups extension. It’s similar to Vivaldi’s workspaces but more powerful when combined with container tabs.

You can use the inbuilt containers to separate cookies, which should allow you to use multiple accounts simultaneously. Profiles appears to be the direct equivalent to chromium profiles however and may function better but I haven’t used it yet.

Firefox does have profiles that you can use simultaneously, but you’ll either have to start it with the –ProfileManager command line option or install something like Profile Switcher to access them.

Firefox can even have different accounts in different tabs with the official containers extension.

‘Work’ bookmarks

Sure buddy.

I do believe there is either a flag or an add on that gives you this option again. I haven’t used it in a while so don’t quote me on that.

Found it. It is an add on. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…/pwas-for-firefox/

For casting, you can use VLC Media Player.

Yes

I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for close to twenty years now and non-compatible websites are extremely rare. I’m sure there are industry-specific shortcomings but for general usage it’s always been acceptable at worst. And its market share is close to 7%.

Firefox can always compete, because if it ever stopped existing Google would have an antitrust case on their hands. For the same reason, Google cannot violate web standards, like what has happened in previous browser wars.

I don’t agree that Firefox is unable to render a portion of the web, I’ve been using it for years and have never once run into a website that had a problem with my browser. I thought once that studentaid.gov did, but that turned out to be a problem with extensions. I’ve seen more websites that have issues with me using Linux than with Firefox.

Firefox user since ever. Never looked anywhere.

Vivaldi is Chromium under the hood.

All you said plus Firefox’s rendering looks like total crap. Maybe you would like ungoogled-chromium?

And… for what’s worth Firefox is a privacy nightmare as well, just start Wireshark and launch the browser to see what it does. LibreWolf or ungoogled-chromium always.

My experience has been the opposite. I will have far too many tabs and windows open and with Chrome I would often see memory usage over 10gb. And on more than one occasion I’d have to end task on chrome as it was locking or already locked up.

Switched [back] to Firefox in the last year or two, same plugins, no change in behavior, and it never locks up. Memory usage is fine. Right now with just as many windows and tabs open it’s using 5gb ram.

Chrome has been uninstalled from my PC.

And the tab containers plugin from Mozilla is really incredible.

Our automation tests run on Firefox on odd days and on Chrome on even days. I don’t think it ever made a difference, tho. It’s getting harder to create bugs that are specific to Firefox or Chrome. Safari, on the other hand, is a fucking mess.

Try the startpage search engine. It has been much better for me than DDG.

Firefox allows you to select a home page, tho? Not sure what your problem with Firefox is.

It’s not an easy transition. My partner works for DDG and I still don’t use it all the time. To their credit they are working to improve things but it’s a small team (comparatively). Their browser has some good features like app tracking protection just from having it installed and quick throwaway email support but isn’t quite up to Firefox’s standard (yet).