It’s really annoying to me that Firefox doesn’t seem to work well on my chromebook, so I’m stuck with Chrome until I need a new computer…
I am from Germany and it is just sad how many people use these apps from shit companies without thinking, when suitable alternatives exist everywhere. Just use Firefox, it will work for 99,9% without any flaw. I would love to ditch WhatsApp, but could only convinge a few people to change to Signal. It is as easy as downloading a new app to prevent supporting Meta, but that’s too much effort for many :-(
Chrome? I’ve heard of that once.
That was a loud ball drop from Google’s hands.
I switched to Firefox many years ago, after their announcement I switched to Waterfox and I’m very happy with it.
How did you choose Waterfox? Are there any resources that compare these FF forks?
Glad I don’t use chrome anymore. Though unfortunately everyone else I know still does.
Webserial is only reason I see to install Chrome. For everything else Firefox works great.
Chrome hasn’t been my main browser in a while but I kept it as a backup and because Firefox doesn’t support PWAs and I didn’t want to mess with the extension. Turns out, the extension only takes about 3 minutes to get set up and now Chrome has been uninstalled. And on a random Tuesday, who knew?
I’m browsing via FF (fork) + Android + PWA right now. No extensions. ?
This is probably the single thing that got me to switch to Firefox. Privacy whatever, I don’t care about my data or the morality of my tech company or whatever, but mess with my adblocker and goodbye.
I’m mostly in the same boat. If you really want to know my kink-search-history, I really DGAF. The morality is nice to think about but it’s all about your personal morals in a lot of cases.
Can I have your bank account username and password?
No
Awww, but understandable. Can I see your bank statements for the last 12 months?
Why not?
Can I have your psychosexual profile and live gps coordinates?
Fish sadist, 47°9′S 126°43′W
Like, a sadist for fish? Or a sadist that is a fish?
Yes
A fish who is a sadist in his sexual relations with other fish obviously.
so you DO care about privacy.
That’s security, not privacy
Privacy is a component of security. But so is assessing the likelihood of risk. I get what the other guy is trying to convey, but it’s asinine to pretend giving your banking info to a random individual is in the same ballpark as giving your browsing history to the company making your browser.
It literally is privacy.
firefox is going through thier own enshittifcation down the line, they changed ther policy about data recently
They changed the phrasing, since in some jurisdictions “sharing anonymized data with partners” can apparently be interpreted as a sale of data, if they get something in return, even if it’s not a fiscal payment.
But after the outrage that sparked, they’ve rephrased the policy again and wrote a lengthy article detailing the reasoning, which is at the very least plausible.
I read about this too, and it worries me. Google has donated over a billion dollars to Mozilla over the years. That alone doesn’t scare me so much as it’s a blatant propaganda tool to deflect the antitrust sentiment that plagues them and will probably some day do its work of breaking them apart.
Fortunately, there are numerous open source forks. I am currently using Librewolf, a fork of firefox focused on privacy and anti-tracking, and it has worked without a hitch. A couple of my extensions have required fiddling with to get right but it’s part of life if you care about these things.
They changed the wording of their policy for legal reasons. They haven’t actually changed what they do. They already updated the text of the policy to clarify.
…The reason being that they can’t legally claim they don’t sell your data.
Yes, because the definition of “sell data” varies by jurisdiction, and they can’t guarantee that their usage of ads (eg the default sites that appear on the new tab page) does not fall under the definition of “sell data” in some jurisdictions. In particular, California’s CCPA is pretty strict and some use cases that aren’t actually selling data still fall under its definition of “sell data”.
And they had this revelation and newfound sense of caution immediately after their main source of income was jeopardized? And they made this change at the exact same time they started forcing users to give them a worldwide commercial license to everything you enter through Firefox? Sure, Jan.
forcing users to give them a worldwide commercial license to everything you enter through Firefox?
That’s not what they actually did, though. They revised the wording to clarify:
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
For example, if you type something into the address bar, they need to have the permission to take your content (whatever you’ve typed) and send it to a third party (a search engine) to get autocompletion results.
Here’s the blog post that clarifies the changes: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
As I understand it that has more to do with covering their ass. They haven’t changed their practices.
The fact that they think they need to cover their ass about selling user data is concerning enough.
Don’t take my word for it, you can read what they said about it here. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Yeah, I read that and I think it’s a weak justification.
I’ll care when Firefox loses ManifestV2 support.
I have used firefox from like 2005 to 2024. I am now using brave and I am quite happy with it. I just disabled all this useless cryptobro crap that it comes with. I tried most of the chromium based browsers and this is by far the one that better fits my needs. It has an adblocker that works well, it has a sync option that is not on google servers and supposedly they dont have that insane telemetry that chrome has. And yes an adblocker is tottally needed and will probably be allways needed. I do run a network adblocker with pihole and nextDNS. I haven’t seen a single add in years and do not miss them at all. I rather ahve a half broken page than some random website trying to sell me satisfiers and blue pills.
I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.
I’ve started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.
If they break youtube in alternative browsers or force ads I’ll finally be able to ditch youtube for good.
Ironically YouTube seems to work better for me in firefox, although the issue in chrome may be caused by browser extensions
What problems with YouTube did you have?
Something was going wrong with video playback. Unfortunately, this was about 10 years ago so I don’t remember many specifics about what the problem was.
I’ve exclusively used firefox to watch youtube on Arch and Ubuntu for years, never had a problem so far for what it’s worth. I keep a laptop in the livingroom with Arch specifically to have adblocking and piping the video out to the TV. The youtube apps are terrible on the Roku last I remember, haven’t tried it in forever but I think the main reason was I didn’t want to see ads anymore.
My wife and I used the YouTube app on a Roku TV for some time, and it was rough. I’m not sure if the intense lag was caused by the app or the low specs of the TV, but either way it was a poor experience.
never had a problem with firefox and youtube
The only problem I’ve had is that you can’t view HDR content in YouTube on Firefox.
That’s not a big part of YouTube (yet), so it is largely unnoticeable.
I know what he’s talking about- there was some javascript spec or something that google proposed, and nobody else bought in, so it never actually became part of javascript’s standard.
But google implemented it into chrome’s javascript engine anyway, and then used it for youtube. There was some fallback code if the new functions weren’t available, but, because of a ‘mistake’ they didn’t work and basically made playback ass for a while until the open source community basically debugged and fixed the issue FOR google, and then spent a few weeks cramming it down google’s throat that it needed fixed.
google does this kinda shit on purpose to reinforce their market position
One of the many reasons why Google should be splitted into different companies
Isn’t it? YouTube isn’t its own company?
It probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself. It’s likely related to something I messed up in FF or it was something to do with the ancient laptop I had at the time being a junk heap, but I tried Chrome and noticed that the trouble didn’t exist there. So I started using Chrome.
I kept using it because of all the google integration, which was really handy when I was using the google business suite to run my own small business. I shut that down two years ago now, so there’s nothing really keeping me on Chrome any more.
I swapped back to FF a few days ago and YouTube works fine now. So I’m back on the FF train and giving Google the finger the whole way over banning the adblockers that I liked.
Yeah if you fiddle around with about:config without knowing exactly what yer doing, shit breaks. Fortunately you can type “about:profiles” in the url box, make a test profile, and mess around as much as you want before nuking your default browser.
t probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself
It probably did. Google has been caught red-handed with messing with Youtube to break Firefox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
There were a few extensions you could run in firefox that told youtube that it was totally for reals being accessed by a chrome browser.
Boy, that would have been good to know back in 2015, I feel like I let Google hoodwink me into using Chrome for all that time.
I’ve been on Firefox since I left Internet Explorer many years ago. But, recently, I switched to LibreWolf, and I’ve been checking out Pale Moon. Pale Moon is close to doing everything I want, but not quite there.
Not surprising, Google is an ad company at this point.
It never was anything else
I stayed away from Chrome alternatives, as it had the best Canvas/HTML5 performance (Which oddly enough, was quite important for most of my browsing needs). However, this news means I will have to switch. Installed Firefox for my primary browsing needs, and a few Chromium-based ones to try out for specifically the aforementioned use case.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
Doesn’t cover 100% of what uBO did, but it still works just as good IMO with DNS based ad-blocking on top.
Surprised so few people are aware of this. It seems equivalent to me when you give it the same permissions Ublock Origin had.
Agreed. I haven’t even found anything that it doesn’t block that UbOrigin did.
But then the whack-a-mole game continues, and you’re constantly having to find new extensions to serve the same task. When you could simply switch to firefox, deal with the very minor growing pains, and keep using uBlock with no problems whatsoever.
I was a super early adopter for firefox. I started using it back in 2005-2006. I’m pretty sure it was still in beta when I started using it.
Over the past 20 years I’ve watched while firefox users have formed a goddamn cult around a software. It’s insane to me, especially because I’m seeing exactly the same things from Mozilla that I was seeing from Microsoft (and later Google) at the time I decided to switch from IE to firefox to begin with…
Firefox isn’t special. It’s falling for all the cloud-based privacy invasive enshittification that Chrome has so far. It’s just getting there slower.
So cool your jets. Especially considering uBlock Origin Lite is uBlock Origin. It’s just compatible with the Manifest V3 standard.
