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Comment by alexruf | Hacker News Reader

I am using Firefox as my main browser for almost 7 years now (exclusive for ~3 years). As I see it Firefox is the only reasonable choice if you are looking for a browser respecting its users privacy.

Personally I never had problems with Firefox breaking pages or having noticeable performance issues. Quite the opposite seems to be the case, since it feels faster and better with every update they released. I really can’t understand all the people constantly complaining about Firefox being slow and buggy. 90% of the time I had issues, it was because of poorly written browser extensions or ad-blockers breaking stuff. It feels like most of the people complaining about Firefox are just looking for excuses to justify why they are too lazy to migrate.

The dangerous thing is when another new Chromium based browser, such as Brave or Edge, appears, which often makes it even worse for the user, since they just share your data with another company.

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> Personally I never had problems with Firefox breaking pages

My experience has unfortunately been different, but the issues are mostly limited to "modern" over-engineered web apps. 90% I encounter one though, checking the console reveals that it's using non-standard Chromium-specific features (whether a FF counterpart exists or not) or just has a lazy browser == "Chrome" check instead of proper feature detection.

OK, but it's not Firefox's fault if web developers don't stick to standards and use Chromium-specific features. The bad thing is, the less people using Firefox, the harder this problem becomes and Chrome defines the de-facto standards.

Of course not. That was basically my point - that while some pages are broken in FF, it's not actually their fault (although how much that matters is debatable as the end-users don't care).

Chromium has very little to do with whether a browser shares user data - it's just an open-source package for making browsers.

I also primarily use Firefox, but Brave is definitely a more serious effort at a privacy-focused browser.

I never used Brave myself. The problem I see with Brave is is their business model being counterproductive for the web. If I understood correct, they block ads placed by the the content creators, just to replace them with their own monetization model... doesn't seem fair to me.

I never really understood brave. It's basically chromium with some google tracking removed and with some inbuilt "extension".

You get the same with firefox plus ublock origin, while supporting a more open web by not using the monopolistic chrome engine. Also, I doubt brave could fork the project for a long period after the adblocking becomes impossible with chromium

Just out of curiosity, do you primarily use a Windows machine? In my experience people using MacOS run into different types of slowness issues when they use Chrome or Firefox.

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