Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy

Now, Apple, with their iOS monopoly, managed to strong-arm the web into a position in which third-party tracking protection was finally possible. Kudos to them, now we can finally release this technology. We're doing it slowly, because by opposition to Apple, we cannot afford to break the web.

Why did Apple do this, though? If you recall, Apple's stance on privacy is quite recent. The tech world has a short memory, but I remember Apple being caught red-handed slurping data from user's iPhones not so long ago. Also, unless things have changed (honestly, I haven't followed), Apple tracks users through their native apps, because you're pretty much obligated to go through Apple's SDKs for many things, and they require a tracking ID, which brings revenue to Apple.

So, yeah, Apple's actions have had some good impact on web-tracking, and that's great. But don't forget that they do this for strategic reasons: 1/ because they want to encourage devs to use another tracking mechanism that the competition cannot emulate; 2/ to immediately hurt the competition.

Now, you are right about the double-keyed caches – although using this to track users is quite more complicated, less precise and less reliable than first-/third-party cookies, it's something we need to address. We're working on it at this very moment.

Finally, yeah, first-party cookies... hard to counter. We're also working on it (is anyone else doing so?), but that will be a tough fight.

Furthermore, they seem to be experimenting with the same 7 day limit for first party cookies [2].

Neither of these approaches is perfect, but it seems better than Chrome with regards to preventing tracking.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platfo...

This is the problem I have with Mozilla -- they claim to be defending the internet, but they clearly have no leverage or power to effect change because their market share is so small.

I can't name a single bad thing that Mozilla has prevented from happening to the internet in the past decade or so.

I also cannot think of a single good thing that happened only because of Mozilla's support. A lot of this do-not-track stuff, for example, was pushed by other browser vendors and would have happened whether Mozilla wanted it or not.

This is a phenomenon known as “journalism”.

I select a URL, and literally sit there for 5 to 10 full seconds before the page even starts to load (it does render quickly once it starts).

I load the same page on the same device with Brave, or Chrome, and there's near-zero latency. It just starts loading right away.

I'd love to switch over, as Firefox is my daily driver on the desktop and it's where all of my passwords are synced. But on Android it just hasn't been usable for me yet.

It did used to run out of memory for images, and the UI of Firefox (and just Firefox) would sometimes pause, but those issues are a couple of years back now.

I'd dig deeper. There's something odd in your machine configuration.

This is on macOS.

Perhaps they could benefit from a bug report.

It's on Windows 10, Nvidia GPU. Have tried the bucket list of things to solve this without any solution so far. It happens even with just two or three tabs open.

I believe it boils down to this unsolved bug, at least in my situation. I do need to profile it myself if I want to know for sure though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501281

It only happens with Firefox, nothing else. All other games, programs, browsers, etc run without issue. Firefox is the only commonality that causes the freezes. If there are no Firefox processes open, the freeze does not occur.

Oddly, I see you're on macOS, where I also used Firefox- but I never had an issue there. Interesting, because it seems my experience is the reverse of that of most Firefox users.

Overall it is just a clunky experience. And I can't run stuff I'm working on because they don't support communication with MIDI devices (they've been talking about it for years)

I think a better solution for many of us is an un-Googled version of Chrome/Blink, such as Brave or maybe even Edge when it is ready. You CAN get the best of Chrome without the worst, and the more Google does these things, the more effort people will go to to make it easier to do so.

I switched from Firefox to Chromium after some problems I ran into on a laptop. The experience wasn't great, but I was willing to live with most of the issues.

However, even after disabling all extensions, it still pegged my cpus and froze my machine, several times a day.

I moved back to Firefox. No amount of features was going to make up for that disruption.

Google may not care about my privacy, but there are no alternatives.

Everyone does that and Firefox still goes away. And you’re left with Google still running the show.

However this has little to do with the discussion, I don't think qutebrowser does anything to stop fingerprinting and tracking like FireFox.

You can do this in Firefox, with several great ad-blocking extensions, such as uBlock Origin or Adnsaueum.

> Browsers anymore have become walled gardens what with their add-on web stores, garbage like Pocket, sync, etc. I don't want any of that. Browsers could all be more like the old-school Konqueror, in the sense that one could import ad block lists at will without resorting to visiting store.

Firefox allows you to remove what you don't need, especially Pocket. Sync is optional.

> No telemetry. No built in search for a certain search engine.

There are specific Firefox configurations that disable telemetry: https://github.com/CrisBRM/user.js/blob/master/user.js

You don't have to install extensions if you don't want them. They're not walled gardens. I can install Firefox extensions without ever browsing any of Firefox's websites.

I agree there should be no telemetry but there are FF forks with that removed.

While this could and I think should be built into the browser having a complex enough addon system to build something like ublock origin ensures that you can always use best in class tools. As an example adblock plus was the best option years back until ublock origin came into being.

ublock origin uses less resources, improves latency, and blocks some things that adblock does not.

Had your hypothetical browser for techies standardized on building adblock plus into the browser you would be stuck with it for some years until they moved on instead of clicking a link in an addon store.

Complex tools always end up being about the ecosystem because core developers neither have man centuries to scratch every itch nor a monopoly on good ideas.

Insofar as you have an ecosystem distributing it via a central store or stores is a proven idea. You can make an informed decision to trust a store which can vet individual developers/companies and also make the decision to remove people who later abuse that trust.

Example stylish was used by many users then sold to scummy people.

Having your users browse the entire web and make the decision on the spot as to what to trust to run on their computer has failed so many times its hard to imagine it needs another try.

It's all well and good to imagine that a sandbox should be used to limit the access an individual app or addon is allowed to have but such cages always have weak hinges somewhere and furthermore people often want at least some apps to have relatively expansive permissions so that interesting tools can be built.

This leaves the users vulnerable to your hypothetical bad addon requesting permission to own the world and the user reflexively clicking yes.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/d...

If you subscribe, they still want to throw ads and trackers at you unless you pay the higher tier fee, at double the cost.

The hypocracy is thick; they're not wrong about Chrome though.

The reporter doesn't control what the Washington Post does; they can only choose what they report on. I am critical of reporters who refuse to acknowledge that conflict of interest, or who only report on the Facebook/Google side of things without acknowledging that this is something that applies to the web (and news sites) in general.

But I don't feel like that's what happened here, the author is reporting on web tracking in general, and giving mostly accurate information, regardless of the fact that consumers who follow it will also be blocking some of the WP's own trackers.

I do kind of get annoyed that journalists aren't doing more to champion ad blockers, given that they are one of the easiest, simplest steps someone can take to reduce tracking. But... baby steps.

Is the WP itself as a business being hypocritical? Sure, but to me that's a very different problem than what I typically see in privacy reporting. I'm more worried about whether or not reporters are willing to include browser tracking and news trackers in the discussion about privacy at all. Is the narrative, "Google is evil", or is it, "we have a structural problem that many, many businesses are complicit in"?

On topic though I recently tried switching to FF and was surprised at how much slower pages were loading. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this just a matter of caching?

Betteridge's law doesn't apply here because it answers the question: it comes down to privacy.

But even if it did, then Bettridge's law would apply. If you read the article, you will see that he doesn't say that Firefox is flat out better than Chrome. If fact, he even gives the performance advantage to Chrome and says that there are ways of "defanging" Chrome when it comes to privacy.

Really, the point of the article is not a technical comparison of browsers, but rather a statement of the importance of Firefox when it comes to privacy. And the value of not using a browser made by an adtech company.

As to ff vs chrome, what I figure is: I'd rather have poorly funded code defending my privacy than well-funded code defeating my privacy.

Do we have a thorough and detailed list of what information is possible in the default Firefox telemetry?

The telemetry bits can be disabled easily. A new firefox installation (or rather, a new firefox profile) will open in a tab: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ . That website has a button under the "Improve performance and stability for users everywhere" section that will bring you directly to the section of the preferences where you can disable telemetry and crash reports and such.

Did you read the privacy page?

PS: Firefox used to pop up a small notification bar at the bottom on fresh profiles instead of that privacy pge that asked you to allow telemetry data sharing. That seems to be gone now. The previous solution was more obvious about the stuff but also worse UI/UX. The privacy page could and should be improved to make the preferences button more visible or at least not-hidden in a collapsed section by default.

Use about:profiles to launch a process with another profile

I don't have any issue with fonts in F30, do you have a picture illustrating the issue?

https://imgpile.com/i/1JyqT1

Roboto font at 14pt, 115 dpi, default antialiasing in Plasma

Containers is solving a different problem than you have. If you have multiple profiles running, how do you want it to know which in profile to load the link? You could set your link helper in your OS to run Firefox with the --profile option, to pre-set it, if that's what you want.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green

That's a bit of stretch given recent Firefox versions. One can argue about the gap, but such a gap, is pretty small these days between FF and Chrome.

More generally, using collected data means you are making decisions based on something that some of your users don't want you to have. That may be fine if you're careful with the data and you provide something of value in return, but the minute you do something that your users don't like, then they can reasonably blame you for acting against their best interests.

If you carry around a can of spray paint, don't be surprised if you get blamed for graffiti.

(This doesn't respond directly to your post; I'm responding to the idea that data collection is a fine and good thing because it helps make browsing faster or more efficient and that's all that matters.)