Submitted 11 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.androidpolice.com/never-been-better-time-switch-firefox-browser/
• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
Switch? I never left!
I deeply regret leaving.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I had a similar history to you.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there’s not really much point as the backend is still the same as Safari there.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
Apple might be the one company that is even worse than Google
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android
“progress”
Aren’t all browsers on ios just Safari with a different skin?
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s
I was in the exact same boat as you. Except I also switched because Bitdefender, the anti-virus I used at the time, was not playing nice with Firefox.
Earlier this year, like a few months ago, I decided to try and switch back. It was seamless. In like half an hour I had every bookmark, most passwords, and even some new extensions that have saved me a lot of work since. I recommend you try it and keep Chrome installed on the side in case you run into some problems, but I think after a few days you’ll realize you don’t need it for much.
(in my case it’s still installed for when I inevitably remember that I forgot to transfer a random password that didn’t automatically migrate)
Porting your bookmarks back is easy. I had a similar experience except I switched back to Firefox in 2015.
If you use Firefox sync on PC and your phone, all your open tabs and bookmarks will be synced automatically.
Exactly. I’ve been here since Netscape Navigator.
There are dozens of us!
Got here from iCab.
-🗿
I did. Chrome updated plugins automatically, Firefox didn’t. Also one bad tab didn’t kill the whole browser.
Plugins are dead now, so I switched back. I’ve still had to kill FF in task manager, due to some weird PSN login bug.
Same. Literally been a user since version 1.
Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What's happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.
Same! The extensions are just to damned useful!
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.
Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.
Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I’m often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can “file away” a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.
Use Vimium add-on and have a pop-up to search your open tab.
Or if you prefer no add-ons or don’t know how to use Vim keybindings then type your search query in the search bar like this:
% my tab title
I’m not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don’t see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it’s really nice. Specifically any job over the phone, it’s almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
You can still group better.
Right?
The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs
Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It’s frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.
Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.
Just wanna jump in here an md mention sideberry as an alternativ, does the same thing, but better imo and has tons of customisation options
Combine that with their multi-account containers and you got yourself a stew, honey!
I wish it was the default (or at least a built in option). It’s a bit annoying to still have to use workarounds to remove the default tab bar.
internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn't have the tree view :p
It's this on Firefox Android?
Pretty sure, the whole sidebar concept doesn’t exist on Firefox Android, so very likely no…
Unfortunately no, but honestly I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.
I could never get used to tab managers like these IF the tabs are still shown in the top of Firefox.
Simple Tab Groups is something that I can get used to, because it works pretty similar as it does with Safari.
There’s CSS you can apply that hide the tabs, but it’s not a straightforward process to apply it.
I wonder if I could script it? Hmm. (I’ve written a developer environment setup script at work that I could add that to…)
The best time to switch to Firefox was 19 years ago when it first came into existence. The 2nd best time is now.
For a few years there I was on the border, extensions used to make firefox extremely unstable, along with it being primarily multithreaded rather than multiprocess. Now it’s much better. I know a lot of people don’t like what the “quantum project” did, but I love it. Now a tab might crash because of some shitty plugin or something but the rest is fine.
It was never a good time to switch to Chrome.
When it was released, Chrome was revolutionary. Sandboxing individual tabs into their own processes was a stroke of genius. Until then, if a single site ate up all your memory and crashed your browser, all your tabs/sites died and you had to start again.
It really was the best browser for a hot minute before others copied the idea.
Totally agree. I also knew this was Google’s modus operandi. The early versions of their software can be amazing and they slowly monetize over time.
I never understood why so many people thought it was a good idea to hand Google the near monopoly power we had just prevented Microsoft in keeping. And that was AFTER we saw how bad it was that Microsoft had that power.
Too many people go for short term gain for way greater long term losses.
Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they’re similar now.
That’s because 99% of people don’t care, exactly the same as with Microsoft. Average person will understand why monopoly is bad when there’s only a single company that sells them gas and suddenly he has to pay $100 per gallon. With tech stuff they simply have no idea. It’s not like they were using IE and thinking ‘It would be so much better if this could pass Acid test’. With Chrome they don’t think ‘it would be nice if this could block youtube ads’ and don’t understand what Google controlling the internet really means. Even governments don’t care about it for the same reasons we do. We don’t like monopoly because of technology and standards. They don’t like it because it slows down economy.
Google took a novel approach of trying to give people a free product that had value to them and features they wanted in a way that was easy to use. Such a product gave a better experience and only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder, something that people have grown accustomed from their governments.
People really bought into that “don’t be evil” clause they used to have, and I’m actually astounded they bothered removing it. It’s not exactly legally binding, so why not just leave it there and do evil shit anyway?
I use Chrome for development purposes only. Dev tools in Chrome are much better still. Firefox dev tools used to be a complete mess, they are better now, but still not a match to Chrome.
But for everyday browsing it’s Firefox for me.
most people don’t give af which browser they use. they trust the brand of google because the search engine was “the best” so they moved from firefox/edge over to chrome thanks to an advertising blitz and deals with vendors to put chrome on laptops
I’ve been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn’t perfect but it’s better than using a browser made by a company that id actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, astro.build Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
What’s wrong with that page? I’m not seeing anything in particular.
Same
Scrolling was a little jittery on both ff and Chrome for me, but the page has a lot of content on it, so I wouldn’t expect it run silky smooth on everything.
Massive lag on scrolling. Are you not seeing this? I’ll record the screen in a minute.
I’m scrolling an have absolutely no issues. Android 12 and Firefox 120.0b9 (Build #2015985090),
What refresh rate is your display running?
exactly this…
i started out in firefox back in early 2000s… then made the switch to chrome and never looked back…
im not the biggest google-groupie but for me to make the switch, google really had to f up in my eyes… and they did
That’s jittery. What’s causing that?
I honestly have no idea of the root cause. Different users are reporting different things. It seems to manifest differently for everyone. At a high level I would say it’s due to the use of a JavaScript framework as a purely static HTML/CSS only site should not be doing this.
I see no difference between mobile chrome/Firefox?
A lot of people have been saying this, some have been saying it lags in chrome, and some have been saying it lags in firefox. I’m interested to know what device you have and perhaps what refresh rate your display runs?
What were the main pain points?
I never left 😘
Exclusively used chrome browser for ~10yrs. Switched to Firefox last week, cause google being evil.
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
The best time was 15 years ago
Personally I’ve never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I’m happy it’s still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can’t go back.
When Firefox announced that a ton of their add-ons/extensions were coming to the mobile app, it got me to switch from chrome after almost 15 years.
Since version 120 is coming to mobile soon with about 200 extensions (as mentioned in the article), can anyone recommend some good extensions that are newly added? I have ublock origin, HD YouTube, Google search fixer, clear url fixer, dark reader, privacy badger, and ghostery
Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
I use it on desktop and phone and honestly been pretty good no complaints.
How is this going to end?
Google blocks access to it’s services for Firefox altogether? Maybe even ban it from the Play Store? That would finally give me a real incentive to install some CFW.
For people asking, it works fine on Nightly.
It’s always been a viable alternative. If the Internet was standard-compliant it would have been the best for a long time
How is it for mobile though? All of my web interaction is through my android
Firefox is Awesome
Personally I prefer LibreWolf (Firefox fork)
No home button is absolutely pathetic. I never stopped using FF on desktop, but until FF mobile gets a home button it’s not going to be installed on my phones.
Moved from Netscape to Firefox and never used IE or Chrome. I never understood the obsession with anything made by Google, glad its going to finally all fall apart for them.
To me its currently the opposite.
I use Firefox for personal use, but I exclusively use Chromium for work just because of the amazing Tab Groups feature. I can’t work without it anymore
Had pentadactyl survived the infamous extension API change (or something like that, don’t remember anymore) I would’ve never left FF. However, I finally made it back, thanks to tridactyl.
I use Firefox Focus as my default browser, and switch to Firefox if I want my session kept for any reason, or Chrome if it’s a Google relate thing.
For almost everything I click through especially out of an app, Firefox Focus is fully appropriate.
I want to switch to firefox but I haven’t figured out how to do the custom searches that I have on Chrome.
Right now I can enter into the chrome bar, for example, s (space) Birds of Paradise (enter) which will translate into scryfall.com/search?q=birds of paradise&uniqu…
I know I can right click on a given search and “add Keyword for this search” but that doesn’t allow me to do custom URLs (e.g. www.reddit.comm/r/%s to go directly to a subreddit, rather than search).
My biggest thing is all the news stories are msn web links. Maybe there’s a way to change that? It’s super annoying
Sanctus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
cybervseas@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s cool just come back and bring a friend with you.
Shaggy1050@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Same here. I left for about 10 years but started coming back slowly a few years ago. After everything that happened this year, I made the full switch to Mozilla on all my devices. I’m very happy to be back though!
helmet91@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why is it such a big deal? I don’t regret anything. Back in the days when Google was a cool company and Chrome appeared, it totally made sense to use Chrome. After they gradually started to get more and more hostile, I switched to Firefox. It was just a matter of exporting and importing bookmarks and setting up some plugins. And changing the search engine.
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
I tried chrome when it released. It was a neat curiosity, bit I never found it to perform so much better than Firefox that I needed to switch.
slaacaa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Same, I deeply regret leaving. Mostly happened due to peer pressure in uni, where everybody was thinking google is cool, and you had to use a lot of google products for classwork. Now google has their tentacles attached all over my online life, and switching feels like preparing for a divorce. Though at least I’m not using Android anymore
KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
you could’ve just degoogled your phone, if it’s comatible with any custom ROMs. android itself is open source, but the preinstalled apps and services are not. that’s where the spyware is. (we will never even know how much spyware is embedded in IOS, because it’s closed source)
Companion1666@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You are forgiven. It’s an adventure.
sock@lemmy.world 11 months ago
i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing