Damn. If there was ever any doubt about why you should get off chrome, this seems to put an end to that.
I don't know what it might take for people to migrate away from Chrome en masse, but the alternative is there.
I have one internal corporate site which won’t work with Firefox for some reason, but never had any problems elsewhere.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...
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I remember reading news in 2005 saying that Mozilla has established its Corporation subsidiary - and I had a bad feelings about it at that time. And years later we can see the effects - what's the revenue, how browsers market share looks like. Now, every time I'm reading that project, foundation xyz is creating "for profit" branch, subsidiary I know that this most likely won't end well. Profits will go over users needs, wishes each time and those at the project will change as well. It's like a magic wand appears and turns open-minded contributors into some mindless corporate drones with an arrogant attitude.
I want to still like Firefox but in last 14 years Mozilla managed to seriously deteriorate trust in its capabilities of handling their main product. And I also cannot fathom how they managed to screw up promotion of the browser and let Google dominate the market. That didn't happen overnight but Google at some point started to bundle their browser as "additional offer" in almost every software installer for Windows, while Mozilla did nothing similar.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
I also want to be able to use the same browser at work as at home, and my workplace banned the use of Brave when it started including a VPN.
On Macs and iOS, and iPadOS, it's clunkier than Safari, but less clunky than Firefox.
Perhaps the Windows experience is similar.
I'm not normally a fan of Apple at all, and I have no interest in using Safari myself, but here I am glad that they've so far refused to jump on the Chrome bandwagon: it's good for keeping the web standards-based so we don't have a repeat of the IE6 days.
No issues with Google services like Youtube (I'm an addict)
I keep Chrome installed just in case, and Edge due to being on Windows.
* side tabs, I would say, the tab is a horizontal extension of the page, so they're horizontal tabs, right?
Also the notion that Mozilla should "just support that"
lol
This is a thing the devs of Firefox should make and implement.
They are making their own solution for vertical tabs.
You are free to install addons.
What is the issue?
Don't just make these snipe driveby comments.
Mozilla is a husk of what it could have been, and that's hurt Firefox.
I can't say for sure it would have worked, but I know that what Mozilla actually did do was actively counterproductive.
I think Mozilla is poorly managed and feature may have been slow or "lagging behind". But for me the lack of those shiny new things might as well be a feature than a bug.
brave a lot more shady and just wont say anything or let you opt out. many examples in the past. imagine if they were anywhere near a quarter of googles size it wouldnt be pretty imo.
All settings in Brave with an impact on user privacy are opt-in. They even inform you of their product metrics, when you first start it, despite having a paper on how they anonymize that data. Versus Firefox, which never bothered. Firefox, which also added metrics for ads, similar with Privacy Sandbox, without informing users.
I've never seen a browser with such a strong focus on privacy, the only contender it has being LibreWolf.
The hate against Brave on this forum is completely unjustified and based on falsehoods, as if the issue isn't about Brave itself.
These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.
It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.
Especially when that position of power is the CEO of a browser that replaces content on web pages.
Mozilla went hardcore political and Chrome copycat long after his time. There was no such controversy there under Eich, and even now as Brave's CEO he isn't doing anything to 'influence public opinion'. Browser CEOs aren't newspaper editors or activists, Mitchell Baker excepted.
I can't remember all of the details but Mozilla made a blog post regarding 1/6 and their commentary didn't align with a browser that would try and protect users from state, NGO and "just research" edu adversaries.
Those "donations" were from handouts of BAT. What they "collected" was their own BAT that they've donated to users of Brave. And it wasn't long lived. At least they've been trying to create a business model that's privacy preserving and that benefits content creators. Firefox has been selling their users to Google for years.
> "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"
You mean like what Firefox also did?
> "and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent."
I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
> "It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage."
He never talked on the topic. And did you know that, at that time, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to same-sex marriage? Times change, people's minds have changed. Whatever beliefs he still has, he keeps private, as he should.
But yes, this confirms my suspicion that this is a US-politics thing, and for non-US citizens, it's getting annoying. While we are on the topic, don't you find it problematic when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism? Or when they promote cancel culture?
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/chris-smalls-ri...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be. And I'm sorry for pointing at Firefox right now, I used it for years, but I'm sensing a serious double standard. So let's talk of Chrome ... have you surveyed the political beliefs of Chrome's developers? Because it's the big, faceless corporations that benefit from this kind of polarisation the most.
> > "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"
> You mean like what Firefox also did?
Firefox did experiment with "Sponsored" results in the URL bar but they did not rewrite URLs to include affiliate links, which is also harmful to privacy: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/gybv0e/brave_br...
> I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
Yes, this was a Windows thing: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se...
Are you referring to the Mozilla VPN that is a separate download? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/download/
> For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be.
Yes, you are absolutely entitled to "vote with your money" (or free usage / market share, as the case may be.) Boycotts are an integral component of free speech and self-expression.
The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/chris-smalls-ri...) is an interview with Chris Smalls, a union organizer. It does not in any way promote Marxism.
(Smalls does at one point talk about "class struggle". He makes it explicit what he means: he thinks there is an opposition between "99.9% of us" and "the billionaires". This is not Marxism even though it uses one phrase that Marxists also use.)
> Or when they promote cancel culture?
The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...) is to a blog post titled "We need more than deplatforming". It mentions deplatforming but doesn't advocate it (though it doesn't condemn it either), and the actual things it calls for are all Not Cancel Culture: "reveal who is paying for advertisements", "commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms", "turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation", "work ... to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies".
You might reasonably disagree with those proposals; for instance, the next-to-last one could be anywhere from "excellent" to "dystopian" depending on what exactly "amplify X over Y" means and how "factual" versus "disinformation" is decided. But none of it is advocating cancel culture.
As for the "deplatforming" in the title: the specific case it's talking about is the idea that a social media platform should ban a particular user who had for some time plainly been breaking the platform's rules, and who (according to some) had used the platform to attempt to organize an antidemocratic coup. "Social media platforms should be encouraged to ban users who blatantly break their rules, even when those users bring them a lot of traffic" and "Social media platforms should not let themselves be tools for antidemocratic insurrection" are positions one can take without being a fan of "cancel culture".
(Not necessarily correct positions. E.g., if you hold that the insurrection in question was not antidemocratic, that it was a response to blatant election-rigging, then you will likely take a quite different view of how a social media platform should respond to it. I don't myself think that's a credible position, and I doubt the good faith of most of the high-profile people who endorse it, but I know it is something many people believe. Anyway, my point isn't that those positions are right, it's that they're positions many reasonable people take, and that getting from those to "Twitter was right to kick Donald Trump off" doesn't require any sort of endorsement of "cancel culture", and that therefore the fact that an article mentions the possibility of doing that in a not-obviously-disapproving way does not amount to "promoting cancel culture".)
Way more than just two chromium browsers in existence.