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Comment by beenBoutIT | Hacker News Reader

It comes down to ignoring Firefox's inferior UI/UX and blindly buying into Firefox marketing.

Seeing as how the internet is actually a shitload of poorly organized data it's unclear what advantage Mozilla gains by not being in the 'data collection business'.

"Firefox isn’t perfect — it still defaults searches to Google and permits some other tracking. But it doesn’t share browsing data with Mozilla, which isn’t in the data-collection business."

Needlessly relearning things to avoid collecting them doesn't make any part of browsing faster or more efficient.

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How is Firefox's UI/UX inferior? The only UI I use on a regular basis are the URL / search bar and tabs. Both are nearly the same.

Delve into settings or try and customize anything and it's much less user friendly.

I'm not sure what you mean. The layout of the settings page is absurdly similar in Firefox and Chrome.

Firefox gives the user dramatically more range to customize their browser than Chrome, is that what you're referring to? about:customization?

Data provides advantage, but it's also a liability. If you collect the data and store it, then it can leak out (perfect anonymization is a pipe dream). Or you can get hacked.

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.)

Firefox is a much better designed app than Chrome, which never looks or acts like normal apps. It has even intercepted cmd-q now which is super annoying. Which browser works better or is faster, I have no idea, though I've never run into problems with Firefox.

> It has even intercepted cmd-q now which is super annoying.

I can understand reasoning behind that. I had to install a Firefox extension that disables cmd-q on macOS because I had closed the whole browser many times by accident (while trying to quickly hit cmd-w). You can still use cmd-q but you have to press it twice in a very short time. Maybe Chrome could do the same.

Firefox uses Ctrl+Shift+Q to quit the entire browser now on Windows and Linux based platforms, presumably because of that reason. You might not need that Firefox extension anymore.

> It has even intercepted cmd-q now which is super annoying.

You can disable that in the "Chrome" menu.

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