Ask Lemmy

I still recommend floorp, I love the sidebar.

Small suggestion: if you’re over 21 stop blindly doing what others do. Start questioning things and do what you think is best.

Firefox used to have a "we're a browser that won't sell user data" promise. Then they changed their TOS and removed the promise, adding:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."

When people reacted to their TOS they said it was an accident, it's just boilerplate, don't take it seriously.

Or in other words: an entity with a team of lawyers claimed ownership of all your data, and then downplayed it, and then has acted good since.

Personally I stick my head way into the alligators mouth and still use Firefox.

Don't you mean Netscape Navigator?

wait people stopped using Firefox? I've been rocking it since like 2006/2007

That was overblown drama. They didn't change anything in practice. They clarified things by writing it down. You disable some defaults and have no issue. Even if you don't, it's not nearly as bad as other popular platforms.

I never stopped using Firefox.

If you want I can look for a comment I made quoting the relevant terms a while back. Or you can look for it yourself.

Simple forks still depend on upstream. I'd rather support Mozilla than not, given no better sustainable alternative. They do some good stuff like Firefox, Thunderbird, and mdn.

The world in general switched from Firefox to Chrome several years ago because at that time (when just released) Chrome was new, shiny, and fast (much faster than Firefox). And at that time everyone loved Google (they still had their infamous "be no evil" motto). And Google also promoted their browser, and, given their web resources are immensely popular, that helped tremendously.

That switch had nothing to do with recent concerns about privacy in Mozilla products.

i think when they killed weave. such a dick move. one of many. may the CEO get most out of the bribe they get from google for selling out its users. i muria even the free and open things are shit.

I just use Librewolf

You guys stopped? :: looks around nervously::

I stopped using it and went to chrome bc my adblock stopped working and i waited for a fix but it didn't come. It worked fine on chrome.

I went back to firefox bc my adblock stopped working but it worked fine on firefox.

these two events are several years apart if that wasn't clear

"We" didn't stop using Firefox. Open source boycotts are complicated because the software is separate from the developers. You can keep using the software even if you disagree with the development organisation.

Mozilla organisation is getting problematic for a whole lot of reasons. My issue with them is that they seem to be in the "more money than they know what to do with it" phase. They're flush with cash, but it's not reflecting to the product. If they buy an ad company and plan AI stuff, maybe things aren't going well.

Problem is, there's no viable competing organisation. Protest forks of software don't really work that well unless you can actually guarantee the development support. Compare this to what happened when OpenOfficeOrg successfully moved to LibreOffice - developers saw the old organisation didn't work, so they made a new one that did.

I stopped using Firefox for four core reasons:

Their investment into AI How they submit and work with their Google overlords to some degree Their browser putting in more and more unnecessary and unasked features (like Firefox account for one) Their Terms of Service

I recently tried to migrate to Firefox after the v2 extension changes in Chrome. I worked, but there were a few things that bothered me.

Chrome and chromium browsers will automatically use the window last used in the MacOS workspace you are in, and this usually works nicely when you have a work workspace and a personal workspace. It keeps things nicely separated when you click on links. Firefox doesn’t do that. It uses whatever window you last accessed. Not the end of the world.

The real problem I had is that the performance when using web tools like grafana in Firefox is so much worse compared to chromium based browsers. It was unbearable. I haven’t tried WebKit yet to see the same services in safari, for example.

I am lazy and have yet to switch to a new fork.

I never stopped using it. There are privacy issues with all browsers. I like how Firefox works, but I regularly end up using Firefox, chrome, and edge all at the same time. I use them for some compartmentalization of my tasks and work lol

Misinformation

I've been back to Firefox for about a year now. Left chrome for it.

Firefox is essential for its various forks even if you have gripes with it

Firefox is better than most but still smugly makes anti-user changes which are complete dog shit.

Remember when they turned off your ability to choose to load extensions that weren’t signed, because fuck you?

Fuck Pepperidge farm, I remember that shit.

Or how about DNS over https, because fuck you, user, why should you have any say over name resolution when you might use that power to block ads and malware?

Because I use only android or Samsung dex. It doesn't work on dex & android seems forgotten. I use per site zoom to much.

I have a silly reason! I got a windows phone and loved it, so was happy to use Edge (when it was still its own thing and not effectively Chrome).

Edge's PDF viewer was great, and in general things were speedy, got out the way, and best of all it synced bookmarks to my phone. :) I also liked the rewards system for using bing, and between microsoft and google, I regarded google as worse ethically. (Obviously... yeah not a solid argument)

I think I switched back to firefox and variants mainly because I started caring about my data, open-source, and also those advantages Edge had were eroding in real-time, with adverts, nagging, and Windows things creeping in - the rewards ended, the chrome thing, it started feeling like the IE days again.

One of my coworkers uses it still, and it pains me to see what new AI gimmick is being shoehorned in.

If I stopped for dumb reasons, I like to think I came back wiser for it. :)

I don't even remember many times Firefox/Mozilla has changed its extension API and broken everyone's add-ons. It gets tiresome.

When? There have been a few times people stopped using Firefox in large numbers.

One of them was when Chrome first came out. Firefox (and every other browser) at the time ran every site in one process. As sites became more reliant on Javascript, which was usually poorly written, that meant any one tab having a problem made other sites and even the browser's own UI unresponsive, or sometimes crashed the whole browser. Chrome's multiprocess model was a revelation. Firefox didn't get its own implementation until 2016.

Recently, there's been some movement away from Firefox due to Mozilla making decisions people don't feel align with open source, the open web, and privacy. The one that has me looking at forks is the planned addition of terms of use to the browser. Terms of use are for an ongoing relationship between a service operator and a user; Firefox is local software I'm operating myself on a computer I own. Its fine for optional online services like Sync to have terms of use, but the browser should work without those.

Still using it here

Back in the early days Mozilla redesigned Firefox interface. It was so incomprehensively moronic that I moved to Chrome.

Because Librewolf exists and Mozilla became an adware vendor.

I never switched, I installed Chrome, started it, saw the UI, hated it, uninstalled it.