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I didn't flip because of features, everything was working just fine for me. I flipped beacuse Chrome, at the time, was incredibly faster and snappier than Firefox. And it remained like that for a long time. I bet a ton of users switched for the same reason.

Same. I actually resisted switching to Chrome for a while because I didn't want to lose functionality that I had accustomed to in Firefox which was lacking in Chrome back then, (mostly in the form of extensions like Firebug) but the difference in speed and resource usage between the two had become undeniably apparent at some point and that's when I decided to switch and learn to live without the features that I'd leave behind.

This particular incidence doesn't in any way disprove the argument that just a few flashy features is sometimes what it takes to get a lot of users to flip to a new -and in some cases, inferior- product though. As software history repeatedly acknowledges, that is fundamentally true.

Having much better autocomplete in the URL bar is what caused me to switch.

Fascinating! For me, Firefox does much better autocompletion in the URL bar than Chrome, and that kept me from switching.

Also, doesn't firefox still contain things like pocket.io and other 3rd party data integrations?

I don't know the current situation but I stopped considering Firefox an alternative or mozilla more trust worthy than Google at that moment.

There are still alternatives but that's more things like the default gnome webbrowser.

At heart Firefox's financing model is as broken as Google's. Yet all the real alternatives aren't investing in the actual development.

Give me a competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button or something similar as only business model and I'll switch. At the end of the day that sort of thing needs financing and Mozilla's strategies aren't at heart different. And I don't know current leadership but I haven't heard the all clear yet. Is firefox currently more privacy conscious? People just assume Firefox is a clean browser but last I checked those assumptions were still marketing and not reality.

It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale.

You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...

But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.

After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.

That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]

Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.

This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

Yeah thanks for mentioning that. The pocket integration would come across better if they put it under the mozilla domain name. I installed Firefox for the first time in a while about a month ago. I plugged it into a proxy to see what it does. When I saw all the Pocket telemetry I was afraid they had gone the Dell "bundling" route, until I looked it up and discovered it was owned by Mozilla.

A competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button as a business model? Sounds like you're staying with Chrome forever then.

Mozilla aren't more holy than the pope, but of course they are more trustworthy and privacy oriented than Chrome. You can see it basically everywhere: containers, cookie management, uBlock support etc. They're not perfect, but they are creating a browser, while Chrome is becoming essentially an ad delivery tool (surprise, surprise, an ad company creating an ad delivery tool).

Agree. Every time I see anyone recommend Firefox as a privacy browser I just assume they are giving this advice to their grandma or sth. Firefox is not whistle clean as a privacy browser. It has location tracking by default and some telemetry that can't be switched off even with flags.

Why anyone who considers themselves privacy conscious would deliberately ignore such red flags in favour of Moz coolaid is beyond me.

Though this doesn't mean I have no love for Firefox. It is a great browser when stripped down of all the bloat. Currently use Librewolf as the FF alternative and this gives me my peace.

Exactly this. Chrome was fast, Firefox wasn't. It still isn't: https://arewefastyet.com/mac/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60

I'm glad there are alternatives to Chrome though.

Wait don't the graph show that Firefox is mostly faster. Lower on the graph means better.

Hmm, in many of the benchmarks there, it is even performing better than Chrome and the like. What makes you say, that it still is not fast? Which one of the benchmark results do you assign more importance than the others and why?

On my Linux laptop I am running Chromium. Do you know if it is going to have this feature or is it just in Chrome. I think websites on Chromium look better than on Firefox and that's important for me. But if that feature is going to be in Chromium too, maybe I'll look how to remove that feature, but I'll have to learn how to compile the whole thing. I tried couple of times but always got stuck somewhere.

Yes, it will be in Chromium as well. It's meant to be a complete replacement for tracking cookies after all. It remains to be seen how much of it you will be able to turn off in the browser settings, as opting out is not implemented yet IIRC.

If it turns out you cannot completely disable it, and you still want to continue using a Chromium-based browser without FLoC, you will have to use a fork. Vivaldi and Brave have already announced they will remove it, and I'm sure Ungoogled Chromium will do the same.

How much of Chrome’s speed advantage (if it even exists any more) comes from hogging RAM to speed things up at the expense of everything else on the system? Truly a tragedy of the commons, compounded by Electron apps like Slack that I unfortunately have to run as a corporate mandate.

I flipped long ago because of a stupid stubborn ui design decision chrome stuck with. In hindsight, if chrome listened to my (user) needs I would probably still be using it. Assuming the privacy bug hadn't caught up with me that is. (Who am I kidding? No one sane should be using chrome as a personal browser in 2021)

The biggest crime chrome made was to add a flag that enabled users to use a bottom address bar then completely remove it months later.

This felony was enough to make me export all my passwords and move them to another Chromium-based browser that had the single feature I had longed for. Funny enough it also opened up my eyes to bitwarden and haveibeenpwned. Maybe all this was sort of due.

I occasionally use vanilla Firefox for testing out ads and other links.

Not only was Chrome much faster, it also didn't leak memory (which was my biggest gripe with FF at that time).

> Also, FWIW, Mozilla isn't innocent either. Despite being very much _less scummy_ they have still upped their scum factor a bit over the years. Let's not forget they are quite happy to trade millions of dollars to make Google the homepage for their users.

"Innocent Mozilla" wouldn't exist today, first because apparently there's always something to complain about, and second because those people also feed families and pay bills.

First thing every web user does, pro or amateur, is configure their browser to access Google easily. One way or another, Firefox will serve Google first, except for a loud minority of people who would use Duck Duck Go or something like that.

So why would Mozilla walk away from millions of dollars? Only to see itself bankrupt and Chrome take its already dwindling marketshare?

> So why would Mozilla walk away from millions of dollars? Only to see itself bankrupt and Chrome take its already dwindling marketshare?

These millions sure are a juicy carrot. Question is, were there other revenue model options, before taking on such a huge conflict of interest? One that effectively compromises you and assures you can never take a real principled stance against your competition.

> One that effectively compromises you and assures you can never take a real principled stance against your competition.

I don't understand this attitude. Is there any better search engine than Google today? No. If Firefox hardcoded Bing to the homepage, or some other such "principled stance", people would completely stop using them.

Principled stances work great for TV pundits and politicians, and in both cases because they don't care if they lie to you.

In the real world we deal with nuance and practical situations. Mozilla doesn't have to HATE or DESPISE or BAN Google, or whatever other verb implies strong enough principled stance. They can recognize them as the lead search engine, and do their part when they're in position to.

It seems in the public debate we want to reduce every situation to a pro-wrestling match.

> Is there any better search engine than Google today?

From time to time, Bing and DDG are better at searching web than Google. Not always, but the number of times I started reaching for an alternative search engine has increased.

For anything political (which is almost everything non-technical now, sadly) Google is a non-starter now because of how much they suppress or otherwise manipulate results.

Depends what you consider "political".

> Mozilla doesn't have to HATE or DESPISE or BAN Google, or whatever other verb implies strong enough principled stance.

Hate and despise show no principle, ban is hard. How about independent, not co-opted?

> "Innocent Mozilla" wouldn't exist today, first because apparently there's always something to complain about, and second because those people also feed families and pay bills.

Do you think companies have to be unethical to feed their families or pay bills?

I think we need to tone down our understanding of "unethical" to something reasonable. There's nothing unethical about Firefox having a Google homepage.

If you start digging too deep, it's unethical we get up from bed in the morning at all.

The problem is it's become a cultural phenomenon to hate big corporations, as a way to offset our guilt for using their products and services. Ask anyone and they'll tell you how much they hate unethical Big Oil and they may even tell you so while using oil-produced electrical power or driving a gas-powered car.

If enough people really cared, they'd change their homepage from Google to something else. They don't. Ergo I guess we're all unethical. Or maybe we need to stop lying to ourselves and realize the world is shades of gray, not black and white.

Isn’t the newer edge based on chrome’s rendering engine anyway? What’s stopping google from doing what they did with Android: remove more and more and more of the parts included with open source Android and move them into closed source Android to the point where vanilla open source Android has much lower utility?

>What’s stopping google from doing what they did with Android: remove more and more and more of the parts included with open source Android and move them into closed source Android to the point where vanilla open source Android has much lower utility?

Microsoft has more than enough resources and engineers to continue to support or even fork Blink even if Google went full closed source (just like Google did back in the day with webkit).

I wouldn't trust Microsoft to be better than Google on privacy TBH. In fact I feel that given the opportunity Microsoft has prooven time and time again they would be worse, but they aren't as successfull with Bing so they don't have the opportunity.

Google can’t go closed source with WebKit because it is LGPL software not originally written by Google.

WebKit came from the KDE project via Apple to Google.

The answer is nothing, but then again there's very little stopping your neighbour physically from murdering you in your sleep too. Perhaps this is not something to worry about, or perhaps it is! The way to figure out whether or not that is the case is to reason a little deeper than "well it's possible", which is true for far too many things to be useful.

> What’s stopping google from doing what they did with Android: remove more and more and more of the parts included with open source Android and move them into closed source Android to the point where vanilla open source Android has much lower utility?

This is somewhat explored territory. KHTML, Webkit, Blink etc. have resulted in a lot of the "important bits" being in WebkitCore.

Yes. the latest edge is a chromium fork, and there is bidirectional development/patches being submitted by MS. I've heard anecdotally that much of MS' effort has been in de-googling chrome, but given MS history, it is probably being replaced with their own telemetry, with the added bonus of integrating their telemetry on the OS level as well.

It already happened with native mobile apps.

Thanks to desire to kill Flash, and the broken support for hardware accelerated canvas and WebGL, given that as game studio you have zero control over hardware support on customer's browser, the flourishing Flash indie scene has moved into Unreal, Unity and Godot targeting native instead.

Even if WebGPU and WebAssembly ever fix what happened during the last decade, they are years away to actually replicate the capabilities Flash offered to gamedevs in 2011.

"Apple has decided to make Internet Explorer its default browser on the Macintosh (booing, clearly audible “Nos”). Since we believe in choice (laughter), since we believe in choice we’re going to be shipping other Internet browsers as well on the Macintosh and the user can of course change their default should they choose to (cheering), but uh, we believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser (jeering) and we think it’s going to make a fine default browser" - Steve Jobs, obvs

Since we believe in choice ... the Google homepage "scum accusation" is a little harsh.

I'm very happy Mozilla / FF are still in the game.

> Also, FWIW, Mozilla isn't innocent either.

Mozilla, you're like... 50/50 on this. You do awesome things like per-site containers and default off for 3rd party cookies, and then you do weird things like the Mr. Robot alternate reality game.

Like... it kills me, because I'm pretty sure you were just trying to be fun and delight your users. And I hate that the web is at the point where nobody trusts anyone. (JoCo? If you're reading this, "Solid State" was ahead of it's time. My favorite album.)

But we need you, HARD.

False equivalence