I've been a Firefox user for years—it's more than a suitable replacement for Chrome. You can also use adblocking extensions on both mobile and desktop.
Never understood why so many seemingly hate it. Obviously work demands Chrome but I haven't installed Google products on my personal pc for a decade.
From what I can tell, there is very little reason to hate Firefox more than Chrome today.
Firefox is considered by experts to be less secure than Chrome, is one reason.
2. You can't donate to Firefox development. You can donate to Mozilla Foundation who owns Firefox. But there are no guarantees that your money will go to Firefox development. Mozilla spends money left and right, including luxury life of management, and only a fraction goes into Firefox development. Mozilla could allow direct donations like they did with Thunderbird but they woldn't.
3. Mozilla Foundation acquired an ads company in 2024 and afterwards released "privacy preserving ads measurement" feature which is turned ON by default. There was a great discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312
4. Firefox is also switching to manifest v3 and thus crippling ad blockers.
For these reasons I'd prefer to avoid Firefox, it's no better. I can only hope that https://ladybird.org/ or some other will get enough funding and talent to make a real alternative. Sending prayers and donations to ladybird for now.
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...
While Firefox will also support v3 they will not break v2.