In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).
So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.
Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.
And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.
This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.
I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.
Google paid a bunch of engineers to work on Firefox, then pulled them to create Chrome. They weren't given a choice. So yeah, not surprising at all.
For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.
Kids these days will never know the struggle of having 10 browser windows clogging up the task bar...
I'm a Firefox user, but I've also already excised most of the rest of Google from my life. If you're still using Gmail, you're likely to stick with Chrome.
It's possible of course that I just don't know any better since I haven't actually used Chrome with any regularity in the last 5 years or so.
...I'm guessing we have a pretty much standardized IMAP protocol to thank for this?
It has a terrible spell checker. I find about as many errors in its spelling as it finds in mine.
There used to be one other thing that really irked me, but it looks like they recently fixed that (I'm on the beta channel, so not sure if everyone has this yet). That was handling of keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts, such as OPTION-HOME to go to the home page, did not work if the focus was in the address bar, the "search in page" field, or a text entry field on the page.
[1] Chrome's dev tools seem more responsive and better organized, and it handles multiple profiles better.
I think that Containers available on Firefox are much better than profiles
For different things I do during development, I want different sets of cookies, bookmarks, history, and add-ons. With profiles, I get that, effectively getting a separate browser that I can extensively customize to its particular task.
You can also start/manage profiles from inside Firefox by navigating to about:profiles.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Safari with Firefox Focus as content blocker works well.
Firefox is losing a lot share just because it gets our fan/cpu crazy on macbooks.
This is the best alternative I've found when using Firefox instead of Chrome.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
Firefox tends to consume a lot of system resources on my pretty modest machine.
(1) it's a PIA to manage both extensions, I'm using WF more & more on Desktop these days. I hope Pale Moon can survive, evolve or one-up their lack of Web Extension APIs.
It also had some weird issues with remote desktop, and I remote to my desktop from meetings fairly often.
In terms of mobile, me guesses you haven't got the news about Mozilla doing away with extensions for newer versions. Plus there are other open source browsers with extension support, even based on Chromium.
>In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
On Android, Blokada, or any browser like Brave. On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.
Not really. Safari provides the API that content blocker extensions you install can use.