All their reasons were pretty strange: tabs on top, features, memory management, privacy… these are all things chrome is undeniably worse on, yet it has more market share.
It really just has to do with chrome being preinstalled on a lot of android devices as @uthredii@lemmy.ml mentioned, and the momentum from one of the biggest tech companies asking you to install it when using any google service.
It seems a bit like a manufacturing consent thing, like “this is why firefox should fail.” So you don’t examine the real hostile business practices going on behind the scenes.
In my opinion:
- Chrome based browsers are pre-installed on Windows and Android.
- Chrome based browsers are approximately the same in terms of speed/usability (this was not the case for internet explorer).
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- And 2. Cause a virtuous cycle where Chrome browsers are optimised for by Devs. Websites are less likely to have bugs for Chrome browsers because of this.
Anacdotally even some non-tech people know that Firefox is better for privacy.
This article doesn’t make any sense:
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In my opinion tabs-on-top has been definitely an improvement. You can switch between them easily, you can see all the tabs available without pressing any key and you don’t need to depend of your desktop environment to switch between these. I use a tiling window manager and this would have been particularly painful if it wasn’t for tabs. In this way you can also have features for tabs like muting tabs and sending them to other devices.
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I don’t know what the writer means with “Then the about:config option was removed”, as far as I can remember I’ve always been able to use about:config. The only exception is the new firefox for mobile, which has been definitely a step backwards, in terms of customization (very few extensions available and no about:config except in nightly) and usability (I’ve been reporting bugs since it was in beta and they are still not fixed).
Type in “Firefox Proton” on Google to look at the most commonly searched suggestions if you think I’m in the minority
This is clearly an example of silent majority. If you like the new design you don’t feel like writing posts here and there to say that. Obviously searching “firefox proton” will show negative feedback, because that’s the only feedback you can get using a search engine. Everyone I’ve spoken to irl has said positive things about the new design, but they’re just opinions.
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I can’t say anything about bad coding paradigms and poor memory mangement, I’ve never actually looked at the source code and I’ve never encountered problems with memory mangement (but I have with chrome)
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The section about privacy is just absurd:
Hidden telemetry that isn’t disabled when you click “disable telemetry”.
Any source to back up these claims? Based on this detailed post in ghacks it’s actually the opposite, and telemetry is collected without any identifier anyway.
Auto-updates you can’t switch off, pinging every 10 minutes
You can easily switch those off in about:addons
“Experiments” which require a separate opt out
Oh no, a separate mouse click. Definitely switching to chrome.
Now the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you wouldn’t need in the first place if not for forced add-on signing.
Why would this be a privacy issue?
In conclusion I think this article is just written in bad faith, most of the claims are either personal opinions or just wrong
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Like I said in the Disqus comments of the article:
The author of this article seems as if he was talking about a very old version of Firefox, because saying that it has a worse memory management than Chrome… Makes no sense when all the tests show that Chromium is a disaster in this aspect…(If you don’t believe me, open 1000 tabs in both browsers and see which one is more responsive). And the bad code paradigm thing… Since they got rid of XUL and the advanced layers on DirectX11 (replaced by WebRender), that’s no longer a problem. Moreover, as Tim Richardson rightly says, since they have replaced the parts written in JavaScript and C++ with Rust, they have improved the components a lot. If you don’t believe me, you can check it with the StyleBench 2.0 test, which measures the CSS performance of each browser. Mozilla rewrote its CSS engine to Rust (Project Stylo) and now it’s better than Chromium!
For people that don’t remember, what did Firefox look like before version 4.0?
