Firefox

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6 reasons why you should forget Chrome and use Firefox (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1473014

Firefox is a great alternative to Google Chrome

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

While Firefox is a completely separate entity from Chrome, Mozilla does recognize that some things are better off standardized. So if you're worried about your extensions not working on Firefox, that shouldn't be a problem.

?!? What does that even mean?

Most people will understand that as 'my chrome extensions will work on FF' or as 'my chrome extensions are also available for FF', which is not true. There are alternatives, yes, but there is real probability they will not find an exact alternative to whatver their most important chrome extension is. Yeah, there are also much better extensions available on FF (looking at you, my dearest and unrivalled uBO) but people usually don't give a crap about that, or they would have ditched Chrome already.

I am all from promoting FF but not by using so large an... approximations. I almost wrote 'lies' but those are not exactly lies, they're just missing the whole point by trying to make things (uselessly) look better than they are.

Edit: clarifications.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Well, what they were trying to say, is that Firefox's extension API is essentially a superset of the Chrome extension API. If an extension works with Chrome's limited API, then it should be almost trivial to port it to Firefox.

But yes, this is not a guarantee that the same extensions are available.
Some extension devs might not care to support both browsers, just because it may require more work for testing and releasing.
In particular, Mozilla also does not allow extensions to make web requests, unless this is part of the core functionality, so if extensions finance themselves via ads or tracking, they likely won't make more money from releasing to Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Also really confusing when you consider adblock extensions and Firefox continuing to support MANIFEST v2