Firefox says Hello.
However these days I find myself using FF more and more for those very reasons, where chromium/chrome is failing more and more. The other side of this is of course that FF has been improving massively in recent years.
There is no best, browsers are ridiculously complicated and hard, but i suppose there are phases, if chromium team loose sight of how non-obscure the requirement to block ads easily is to all users today, this may be the start of a different phase.
I don't think you realize how many tech illiterate people don't block ads.
Opening up Chrome feels very dated.
Every time I open it up I feel like I’m stepping back in time to 2009. All those rounded bezels!
I can feel my laptop loudly spinning fan, after a long running firefox session. It stops doing this, if I close / restart firefox.
If more people switch to Firefox, this might be an additional effect: a rise in the usage of desktop mail clients.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=909818
(I've seen variants of this problem on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.)
I don't mind automatic updates. I don't mind being bugged to restart. However I really dislike that my browser can just break in the middle of a browsing session because of some remote decision.
It feels like the people at Mozilla are forgetting that the browser and browser extensions are tools that people use to do important things.
Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
More importantly: with the current status quo where both site operators and ad networks reject responsibility for security implications of their ads and ad networks show little regards for privacy, the only way I see to respect Principle 4 "Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional." is to block offending ad networks.
As for principle 5 I do not hold my breath but hope you are right.
Mozilla has already being force from external pressure in the past, see DRM.
So you claim. I claim that this is wrong.
> Mozilla has already being force from external pressure in the past, see DRM.
Very different as the pressure was from not losing even more user who suddenly would be unable to use Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, etc. They fought the proposal but once it was established they had no real way of not including DRM blobs and stay a mainstream browser.
Nevertheless, it could be due to personal opinions, but catering to your main commercial partner's business model is imo more plausible.
As much as I am in favour of ad blocking, anything which modifies the content of a requested resource should be opt-in.
Over 90% of Mozilla's funding comes from having Google search as the default[0]. If FF users weren't seeing ads, then Google would have no reason to pay for that service. So Mozilla loses its funding.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
I keep hoping for the day I can switch and not lose productivity.
Here is the bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429
No one seems to care, basically a soft "won't fix". I even thought about fixing it myself but after seeing that the solution wasn't obvious, I gave up.
I wanted to give Chrome a try anyways, so I did. And not only mouse zoom worked but pages also loaded faster. Time to completion was about the same but it took less time to actually see something. For the rest, I had no trouble finding extensions to match what I could do with Firefox. Clear win for Chrome.
Now, I am using Firefox at work and Chrome at home so I can follow. What I noticed was:
- Firefox performance more or less caught up with Chrome (or is it the other way around?)
- Chrome seems a bit more stable
- Generally, switching is super-easy, besides syncing (Firefox doesn't sync with Google and Chrome doesn't sync with Firefox sync, and I am not a fan of third party solutions)
- I've yet to re-test mouse zoom, but according to the bug report, it still isn't fixed.
Note that mouse zoom may seem trivial but it is not. Chrome and Firefox are practically the same, at least on the desktop, so small details like that are what make people switch.
And to be honest, I am pretty pissed off with Firefox. They have really good core devs. Servo is awesome, and even though I dislike the community (seen from the outside), I also find Rust to be just as awesome for its application. Direction however is seriously lacking.
The latest goof was the extension signing fiasco. Again, small thing, but enough to turn off some people. The most ironic part is that they fixed that using a telemetry-related backdoor. I don't really have a problem with that (otherwise I wouldn't use Chrome) but for a browser that advertise itself as privacy oriented, it is not good publicity.
* no battery nuking while jira is open
Like listen, I really want to like firefox. But I use jira all day.
Best of both worlds.
I'd imagine Google saw a slight increase of revenue during that period.
No wonder why they don't allow extensions on their Android browser. From everyone I know, only I am using Firefox on a Chrome device.