I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.
Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.
I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.
Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don’t spend hours on the “internet” surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I’m getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol
You are mostly right. Think about how many people use chrome on corporate office computers that they do not have permission to install anything on or modify. It’s part of the reason Windows is so dominant. Businesses run windows and chrome a shit ton. I work for a Fortune 100 company. It’s Windows and Chrome across the whole company.
Especially your security programs, like third-party antivirus or firewalls. They can install system-level plugins in your browsers, and sometimes those don’t work well. Windows defender and the built in firewall are good enough and play nice with other programs.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that’s on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
Just look at how popular threads is. Only a tiny group of privacy enthusiasts are truly worried about privacy. The general public in the whole world do not give a flying fuck.
It really looks like the general population is actively looking for new ways to get their data harvested and their attention spans damaged. People are rejoicing over a new social media app (and it’s from facebook of all companies!!!). They’re rejoicing over a new poison and that’s mind-blowing to me.
But then again I use Lemmy so who am I to talk? (Whilst Lemmy is an improvement from most other social networks, I still consider any social media use to be a detriment to my life)
I don’t really think using social media is inherently bad or harmful to anyone’s health, since human beings are striving for communication with others. Also I think privacy is a more first world problem as if people in developing countries, are not particularly interested in privacy at all. They are just going for things that are trendy, where a lot of people gather and do the same thing. Threads, TikTok, Twitter and obviously Facebook are all very popular yet the companies never hide their intentions to harvest personal data for profit. I guess if the companies pay people back for use of their data, even more people will say they are willing to give their data in exchange for tiny bit of money.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven’t found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don’t want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
Most Chrome extensions can easily be run in Firefox. Simply download the CRX and upload an copy to addons.mozilla.org as an unlisted extension and within a few hours the extension should be approved and ready to install in Firefox.
Reddit being enshittified is what motivated me to switch back to Android. I don’t want to continue using a a locked ecosystem only for apple to one day say: “Welp, no more adblocks 😜 Oh you use VLC? Dude that’s for pirates only. Signal? That’s for terrorists. Standard Notes? What evil plans are you hiding? Banned Banned and Banned.”
I used iPhones because everyone else was using them so I kinds fell for the peer pressure thinking “Hmm… what are the odds that Apple become evil? Probably don’t have to worry about it.” The Reddit shitshow just triggered a fear in me that made me rethink about my life decisions. Apple’s locked ecosystem suddenly looked terrifying to me, and I just wanna nope out. So I got an Android phone and gave the iPhone to someone. I love my apks and don’t need to worry about Google-Play shennanigans.
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: contrachrome.com
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Some websites just don’t work in Firefox, though. This is more of a fault of the devs, they’ve made websites that were only tested in and only work in Chromium, but it’s the nature of things occassionally.
First and foremost I abandoned Chrome for the 3rd reason and haven’t looked back. One of the largest corporations in the world can’t make a web browser that doesn’t use an obscene amount of ram to open 3 tabs at once :0
“Google is pointing out issues with my site performance. It’s forcing me to inspect what I can improve. I finally removed google analytics and mobile performance jumped from 70 to 96.”
I think that should tell you everything you need to know about how bloated Google is.
My biggest issue with FF is the lack of the ability to switch accounts easily. In Chrome I have a work account, a home account, and a side hustle account. Each has their own bookmarks, themes, passwords, and history.
I have tried using FF and the few workarounds to match this feature, but so far it has none worked as smoothly as chromes 2 button clicks to switch accounts.
Container tabs? They are an official extension but for some reason don’t come pre-installed. I use them extensively for exactly this. Also they are great for paywall evasion, as they don’t count as incognito browsing but can be created and destroyed in seconds.
You can have full on separate profiles in Firefox with no common data between them! Accounts, cookies, settings, extensions and their data, even configuration flags and where the profile folder is located on your computer can be customized for each profile! You can even have multiple profiles open simultaneously. Check out about:profiles
Firefox has Container Tabs, where you can separate your personal, banking, work etc. Aside of that, they are completely separate sets of cookies used. You don’t need to open new window.
You can always use firefox’s profiles to manage different profiles and the “profile switcher for Firefox” extension. 2 clicks to change profile that way.
FF has been my daily driver… longer than I can remember on essentially anything that can handle a browser. It’s powerfull, feature rich, extensible, etc. But it does tend gain weight between major overhauls.
Out of curiosity, being a Linux user, I installed Chromium not 2 weeks ago and the thing is fast. It outperforms Firefox on my aging machine by far. And I was actually surprised. Yes, I do have the ghost of Google just waiting to sink its fangs in me, which I dislike, but I really have to admit the browser is fast, light and easy to approach for new users.
Will I let go of FF? Not really but Chromium did manage to get my attention.
Google invested millions in making the fastest JS engine called V8. It is so good that it made JS a feasible backend language (node.js). I have a really fast machine so JS scripts cannot slow it down and Firefox’s spidermonkey is more than fast enough and I really enjoy Firefox user experience
I was impressed with Chromium but not enough to turn away from FF any time soon.
The machine I use on a daily basis is under powered, at best, for the demands of nowadays; it still does its job but it would appreciate being relegated for less intensive functions. But the moment I upgrade for a newer machine, my complaints will be going out the window and my small differences with FF along with it.
But objectively, I have to admit, based on my personal experience, that Chromium is faster than FF on my machine and less resource hungry.
I was originally an Opera user (back when it was using Presto) back in the day, but I switched to Firefox during the last moments of the Presto engine. When Presto died, I worried a bit about the state of other browser engines, but I didn’t worry about it too much because I never thought Microsoft would use Chromium with their Edge browser. Yet, here we are.
Putting privacy concerns aside, we should encourage the use of Firefox because it helps promote browser engine diversity. The more diverse browser engines we have, the better it is for us, especially when it comes to innovation. I mean, it may be a bit different than the era of Internet Explorer, but since Google is leading the Chromium project, who knows what could happen.
They might remove a particular feature that was once very useful for whatever reason, and we could end up just accepting it because we can’t do anything about it.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
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