Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox

I assume the author isn't on Quantum because my experience (developer edition) matches yours. Firefox is mind bogglingly fast, which is precisely why I dumped Firefox for Chrome when Chrome first launched. My extensions seriously bloat memory usage; memory is cheap, time is priceless.

Features and privacy are great, but the performance is simply so incomprehensibly far ahead (and we don't even have Servo yet). The omnibar is also default now and is more reliable than the extension - that was one crucial Chrome holdout for me.

Not quite the same thing, but there's (almost) always a weird interplay and tension whenever something actually needs to get funded or make money.

1) The search engines pay money and receive something in return. That's a closed off transaction. It's not like Mozilla needs to keep them happy, so that they come back. Sure, it would be nice, if more than one search engine continues to exist, so that there's competition for that spot, but that's about it.

2) Search engines are not actually that dependent on tracking. The ads can be placed based on the search query, and a browser can't block them from tracking that search query.

3) There's competition between search engines, so even though they share a common interest in being able to track users, it's not like they'll all agree to give up that spot. When one search engine is pissed off enough with Firefox to not want that spot anymore, another one will gladly fill in.

And 4) there's already other politics that prevent Mozilla from blocking all tracking. Webpage owners need to be kept happy, too. If you block tracking, those make less money off of your browser, are less likely to spend money to fix or develop things for your browser and so on. With so many users voting for Chrome, too, there's little incentive for webpage owners to spend anything on supporting Firefox already, so Mozilla can't be too aggressive with taking tracking away from them. And I feel like that's much stronger than the search engines' stake in Firefox.

Seems the same issues plague both browsers and one will just arbitrarily work better for some people.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

As to your question, there are lots of articles comparing the new FF to Chrome..

https://fossbytes.com/firefox-quantum-vs-google-chrome-compa...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-quantum-vs-chrome-are-...

I find Firefox Dev tools to be a bit nicer,esp. the network tab. Firefox also has a few experimental features that are okay, but the fact that they're experimenting is worth something (eg the JavaScript scratchpad feature).

To give some rough image from what I know about the browsers and what I've heard other people say:

Performance: Roughly equal, Chrome seems to still be more consistently fast, which Mozilla is still cleaning up after that big architecture change. Mozilla also has more in the pipeline, which I'm not seeing as much from Chrome.

RAM use: Firefox is still considerably lower here, even though the Quantum iteration needs more RAM. There's little motivation for Google to have users use software outside of their web browser, they can't display ads or gather data in those, so there's little motivation for them to not eat up all of the RAM.

Customizability: Clear win for Firefox. You can drag UI elements everywhere you want, color the whole UI with extensions as you like or even fuck around with CSS to alter its look.

Extensibility: Chrome still has more extensions in numbers, mainly because Mozilla does not allow telemetry in add-ons (unless the users opts in). Firefox extensions are more capable, though.

And Chrome's extension store is a dumpster fire, filled with malware. Mozilla vets extensions with actual human beings, which Google doesn't consider an option.

Security against script-kiddies: Also roughly equal. Chrome has to a minor degree still a more secure architecture (sandboxes each tab individually most of the time, whereas Firefox sandboxes them in groups of how many cores your CPU has, for performance reasons), but Chrome on the other hand has some glaring idiocies here and there.

For example Chrome's autofill fills in data in all input fields on the page at once, meaning that it will also fill input fields that you as a user can't see, so you might send off your address to a sketchy site without knowing about it. Another example is them shipping the WebUSB-API in a form that made Yubikey Neos completely exploitable, as webpages could literally just connect to the Yubikey on their own and read out the secret, bypassing the U2F API that Google had built into Chrome.

Security against Google and in extension US intelligence agencies (and in extension non-US intelligence agencies): Well, you can probably guess by yourself. Chrome Sync by default uploads your browsing history and such to Google's server in decryptable form. So, Google can access it, and because of US law, the US intelligence agencies can grab it from Google's servers, too. And because those intelligence agencies are friends with other intelligence agencies (Five Eyes etc.), those likely have your browsing history, too. Obviously depends how much you consider these a threat, but it's certainly not in your favor for these groups to have your data.

You can bypass that, by enabling end-to-end-encryption, which Google requires a second password for, so it's not necessarily an argument when you know about it, but that brings us to what the article mentions, too.

Defaults: Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default. Only one password needed. Firefox's Private Browsing mode ships with Tracking Protection, no (potential malware) extension needed to block trackers, not that Chrome even allows extension to run in Incognito mode.

And these are just superficial examples. We're talking about millions of lines of code, tens of thousands of design decisions. In one case made by a non-profit, that always tries to protect users while trying to not piss off webpage owners too much, in the other case made by a company that always tries to satisfy its own needs in the hope that users don't notice or don't complain too much. And again, millions of lines of code. Lots of shit goes under the radar that no journalist reports about. Even in Chromium.

This is for example a project that tries to fix Chromium and it admits that it's an uphill battle: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Given that Chrome keeps cookies for the window lifetime, I'd say that the fact it throws away history gives a false sense of security - they may not get exact history, but they can get some data still.

If you want the behaviour you are describing, it sounds like the feature should be "private tab" not "private window".

It'd be one thing if a quick C-S-t within a few seconds could restore something you accidentally closed, but this behaviour is utterly incomprehensible.

I would say 99% of the time, Firefox is great for me. There are occasional sites that I open in Chrome - either because of video choppiness or JS going out of control on a page.

However, I would love it if it were less of a gamble when upgrading versions.

Or it's a simple matter of it not having file access permission to a file that it needs and running it as administrator obviously grants it access to that file.

Not that this information is likely to help you fix that issue...

Way too many websites (including CNN) turn a humble article into something barely appropriate by plastering ads, animated ads, video ads, and other irrelevant, bright, colorful mess around the text. Reader View takes one back to text.

Also appreciated by someone who doesn't want to signal "I'M READING A TABLOID" with their screen by simply opening a CNN link.