• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
It’s cool just come back and bring a friend with you.
Same here. I left for about 10 years but started coming back gradually a few years ago. After everything that happened this year, I made the full switch to Mozilla on all my devices. I’m very happy to be back though!
Why is it such a big deal? I don’t regret anything. Back in the days when Google was a cool company and Chrome appeared, it totally made sense to use Chrome. After they gradually started to get more and more hostile, I switched to Firefox. It was just a matter of exporting and importing bookmarks and setting up some plugins. And changing the search engine.
I tried chrome when it released. It was a neat curiosity, but I never found it to perform so much better than Firefox that I needed to switch.
Same, I deeply regret leaving. Mostly happened due to peer pressure in uni, where everybody was thinking google is cool, and you had to use a lot of google products for classwork. Now google has their tentacles attached all over my online life, and switching feels like preparing for a divorce. Though at least I’m not using Android anymore
you could’ve just degoogled your phone, if it’s comatible with any custom ROMs. android itself is open source, but the preinstalled apps and services are not. that’s where the spyware is. (we will never even know how much spyware is embedded in IOS, because it’s closed source)
No expert at all, but isn’t it the case that the phone is then somewhat marked as not trustworthy, making it impossible to use banking apps and such?
from what i understand, it’s possible to re-lock the bootloader and use some kind of security patch to be able to do that. it’s definetely possible.
unfortunately not all custom ROM are able to relock. You can off course use Magisk with Sygisk and then you can use your costum rom phone for bankig apps and google wallet. I am using one myself - https://lineageos.org/
You are forgiven. It’s an adventure.
i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing
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When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.
Switch? I never left!
I deeply regret leaving.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I had a similar history to you.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
- switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
- switched Google Search Engine to searxng
- switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
- switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
- switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
- switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there’s not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple’s browser engine.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
Aren’t all browsers on ios just Safari with a different skin?
Yes but using Firefox you get bookmarks and history synced.
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s
Porting your bookmarks back is easy. I had a similar experience except I switched back to Firefox in 2015.
If you use Firefox sync on PC and your phone, all your open tabs and bookmarks will be synced automatically.
I was in the exact same boat as you. Except I also switched because Bitdefender, the anti-virus I used at the time, was not playing nice with Firefox.
Earlier this year, like a few months ago, I decided to try and switch back. It was seamless. In like half an hour I had every bookmark, most passwords, and even some new extensions that have saved me a lot of work since. I recommend you try it and keep Chrome installed on the side in case you run into some problems, but I think after a few days you’ll realize you don’t need it for much.
(in my case it’s still installed for when I inevitably remember that I forgot to transfer a random password that didn’t automatically migrate)
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android
“progress”
Apple might be the one company that is even worse than Google
Exactly. I’ve been here since Netscape Navigator.
There are dozens of us!
Got here from iCab.
-🗿
Same! The extensions are just to damned useful!
Same. Literally been a user since version 1.
Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What’s happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.
I did. Chrome updated plugins automatically, Firefox didn’t. Also one bad tab didn’t kill the whole browser.
Plugins are dead now, so I switched back. I’ve still had to kill FF in task manager, due to some weird PSN login bug.
Just because Google broke the most trafficked site on the internet for Firefox doesn’t mean its a bad browser. Hell that’s a ringing endorsement.
Personally I’d rather stop using any Google services, than handing them a Chrome monopoly. Google is already way to dominant IMO.
You should stop using Google services anyway. They are terrible for privacy and for your digital freedom in general. And there are so many alternatives.
I absolutely try to limit it. I use Qwant for search. I don’t use gmail except to register Android. In android I don’t use google services like calendar. I only use Google play for 1 app that is only available through Google play.
My biggest dependency is probably YouTube, which I must admit I use a lot.Qwant is a good option. AFAIK you can use Android without logging in to a Google account. You can use Aurora Store to anonymously download apps from the Play Store without having to log in. If you have to access Gmail, don’t use their app, it’s full of trackers. Use K-9 Mail instead. For YouTube, you can use LibreTube or NewPipe on Android and Invidious or Piped in your browser. SmartTubeNext is a great option for Android TV. You can also use the Universal Android Debloater to remove any Google apps and services you don’t need.
Thanks, lots of options I wasn’t aware of. 👍 😀
I am trying to slowly quit all Google services
That’s great
I didn’t notice they broke it. The website works on my Firefox as usual. Maybe you lack some plugins? (like ublock origin, sponsor block, age restriction bypass…)
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I still don’t see that they broke FF specifically, they’re fighting back against adblockers, including the ones in browsers like brave.
They added a literal sleep(5000) to the javascript for youtube accessed via firefox.
- Hasn’t been happening on my Firefox
- There have been reports on other browsers as well, so this isn’t a firefox specific issue (p sure I’ve seen some people that use chrome claim they had this issue)
Also, 3. That was meant to target ad blockers, not Firefox users
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From what I’ve gathered from other threads, it’s meant to target ad blockers, not Firefox users. It appears though that Firefox users ended up in the crossfire, while uBO can be rigged to block the
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which site is that? Google search page? it works fine for me in every browser I’ve ever tried it on.
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.
Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.
Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I’m often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can “file away” a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.
Have you tried tab session manager? I was planning on testing it to check if it provides additional value…
No I haven’t, but I’m intrigued!
I have and it’s great.
Also, unlike a lot of people I just delete vast swathes of my tabs from time to time.
Let’s be honest, you didn’t need it and I didn’t need it.
But I’m still gad I can go back to a random tab from a week ago from a session I had closed out of
Tree style tabs on it’s own just sounds like it would be enabling my tab-hoarding tendencies. But bookmarking entire trees of tabs is too good to pass up.
Though loading the saved tree do only from sidebar (ctrl+b). Loading from bookmarks window is bugged, undoes trees upon loading.
Use Vimium add-on and have a pop-up to search your open tab.
Or if you prefer no add-ons or don’t know how to use Vim keybindings then type your search query in the search bar like this:
% my tab title
I’m not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don’t see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it’s really nice. Most of the time you’re opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.
Specifically any job over the phone, it’s almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
Don’t get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don’t last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that’s a sign they should be cleaned up.
On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.
Fair. For me, I’m actively working with the customer, and they can forget something at any moment, and you have to go back, so you have to keep them all open as reference, until the end of the call. You do “prune” them as you go along though. I swear, though: the second you close out that tab they’ll have a question for that exact tab you just closed out. You also can’t memorize things because they always change, you just have to get good at navigating the resources. Maybe that’s a bit niche.
You can still group better.
Right?
The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs
Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It’s frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.
Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.
It does one level of nesting with tab groups. Just drag one tab onto another to start.
Just wanna jump in here an md mention sideberry as an alternativ, does the same thing, but better imo and has tons of customisation options
Combine that with their multi-account containers and you got yourself a stew, honey!
internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn’t have the tree view :p
I wish it was the default (or at least a built in option). It’s a bit annoying to still have to use workarounds to remove the default tab bar.
I could never get used to tab managers like these IF the tabs are still shown in the top of Firefox.
Simple Tab Groups is something that I can get used to, because it works pretty similar as it does with Safari.
There’s CSS you can apply that hide the tabs, but it’s not a straightforward process to apply it.
I wonder if I could script it? Hmm. (I’ve written a developer environment setup script at work that I could add that to…)
It’s this on Firefox Android?
Unfortunately no, but honestly I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and
horizontalvertical screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 19 years ago when it first came into existence. The 2nd best time is now.
It was never a good time to switch to Chrome.
When it was released, Chrome was revolutionary. Sandboxing individual tabs into their own processes was a stroke of genius. Until then, if a single site ate up all your memory and crashed your browser, all your tabs/sites died and you had to start again.
It really was the best browser for a hot minute before others copied the idea.
Totally agree. I also knew this was Google’s modus operandi. The early versions of their software can be amazing and they slowly monetize over time.
I never understood why so many people thought it was a good idea to hand Google the near monopoly power we had just prevented Microsoft in keeping. And that was AFTER we saw how bad it was that Microsoft had that power.
Too many people go for short term gain for way greater long term losses.Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they’re similar now.
This is my recollection, when chrome first came out it seemed significantly faster than IE and Firefox at the time, and Google was much less evil big brother at the time.
Back when it was only really known for Search.
So it’s only feasible to prevent a monopoly now, because it’s convenient? Disregarding the huge inconvenience a monopoly always result in!
Yes, but not because I didn’t try. I tried Opera and Konqueror for a time and they had some serious rendering problems. Being on the Internet all day for work I kinda just need a browser that works. Firefox is that for me now, but it wasn’t always up to the task.
That’s because 99% of people don’t care, exactly the same as with Microsoft. Average person will understand why monopoly is bad when there’s only a single company that sells them gas and suddenly he has to pay $100 per gallon. With tech stuff they simply have no idea. It’s not like they were using IE and thinking ‘It would be so much better if this could pass Acid test’. With Chrome they don’t think ‘it would be nice if this could block youtube ads’ and don’t understand what Google controlling the internet really means. Even governments don’t care about it for the same reasons we do. We don’t like monopoly because of technology and standards. They don’t like it because it slows down economy.
Google took a novel approach of trying to give people a free product that had value to them and features they wanted in a way that was easy to use. Such a product gave a better experience and only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder, something that people have grown accustomed from their governments.
only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder,
That’s a huge misconception of what’s going on. The consequences are way more far reaching, because Google is also a giant in other aspects. If it was only Chrome, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
People really bought into that “don’t be evil” clause they used to have, and I’m actually astounded they bothered removing it. It’s not exactly legally binding, so why not just leave it there and do evil shit anyway?
I feel like it actually got worse after they removed it. Although the signs were beginning to show.
most people don’t give af which browser they use. they trust the brand of google because the search engine was “the best” so they moved from firefox/edge over to chrome thanks to an advertising blitz and deals with vendors to put chrome on laptops, at the time was a better browser and much more stable since it silo’d tabs into processes (which is what almost all browser do now).
Many people that are not very tech minded, are very well aware that Google has become to big, and control and know to much. Yet they use Google services, because they are default, and they don’t know how to change it or use alternatives. That’s probably the case for about 90% of people, which is why defaults are so powerful.
The real idiots are those that know tech, but don’t care.
Exclusively used chrome browser for ~10yrs. Switched to Firefox last week, cause google being evil.
That behavior deserves more internet points
okay but listen to how evil Google actually is, they have disabled my Firefox browser. It’s simply doesn’t work. It was my default for years and now only Chrome works on my phone 😡 Is anyone else experiencing this?
I never left 😘
Personally I’ve never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I’m happy it’s still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.
there was a while there if you used more than a few extensions you’d have a lot of issues. Also there were tons of issues over the years where there were some massive memory leaks. It has gotten much better since then with quantum and electrolysis.
your memory might not works very well since it was never called plain “mozilla”
In the early days when it was first created from the Netscape baseit was definitely branded as Mozilla. Source: I’m old enough to have used it then. Check its wiki page. Covers its early days as an app suite which included the browser.
Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.
- Netscape Navigator
- Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
- Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
- Netscape open sources Netscape Communicator 5.0 as Mozilla with the proprietary bits & crypto stripped out. BTW Mozilla was the internal name of Netscape exposed in the user agent and easter eggs like about:mozilla
- Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
- NGLayout becomes Gecko
- Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
- Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
- A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
- Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
- AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
- Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn’t use so much XUL in the browser but is still the Mozilla / Gecko code base. It proved popular because it was more focused and loaded a bit quicker.
- Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
- Firefox progresses to where it is today.
So yeah it’s a continuation all the way back. I also worked at Netscape at the time so I got to see much of this transition.
I was today years old when I learned that the first web browser I have ever touched (NN) was, in fact, the great grandparent of Firefox.
Very little though, almost all that code has been replaced/rewritten over the years along with all the new stuff that has been added.
Yup. Not much of it survives in the code since it was mostly rewritten from scratch but I guess if you looked at the nspr (portable runtime) or nss (crypto) code that there are remnants of those early days still in there.
I recall the switch from Mozilla to Firefox as being a huge improvement not just in loading time, but the user interface felt much less sluggish overall and keyboard navigation was better. To me it felt like they had ditched 80% of the code base to make a lean, mean browsing machine. Both browsers were around for a couple of years so Firefox seemed more like a fork than a rebrand.
The way Mozilla worked and Firefox still works is there is a cross platform front-end implemented in XUL which is XHTML, CSS and Javascript. The engine underneath is the same (Gecko) but the frontend app over the top is what the user sees and controls buttons, menus, functionality.
Firefox was basically a fork of Mozilla stripped of the not-browser stuff and a cleaned up UI. It proved popular as a prototype so it grew into its own thing and Mozilla suite was abandoned. There is still a Seamonkey project that keeps Mozilla suite alive but it’s outside of the Mozilla foundation.
The reason it’s faster is that Mozilla was an entire suite expressed as a lot of XUL so it impacted loading times. XUL also had this neat trick that you could overlay XUL over the top of other XUL so the mail app was injecting buttons, menus and whatnot into the browser and vice versa. This was cached but it still had to be loaded. In addition and probably just as impactful, was that Mozilla shipped as dynamic libraries (DLLs) and a relatively small EXE, so it took time to start. In Firefox, the number of DLLs was reduced with static linking so it was more efficient to load.
If I remember correctly, XUL/XBL is dead. They removed that code a while back after they transitioned to WebExtensions. The current frontend is HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
There are still bits of XUL around but I believe the preference is to use HTML elements wherever possible and they’ve been stripping XUL elements out.
Ooof you thought you were clever, but you just look like a fool on the internet!
When Firefox announced that a ton of their add-ons/extensions were coming to the mobile app, it got me to switch from chrome after almost 15 years.
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
They are fantastic! Way better than having 6 seperate “browser profiles” open. 🙄
For sure, Aws sso containers is a bloody game changer
I have this extension and I always thought it’s duty was to contain Amazon services from interacting with my other sites i.e., stop Amazon trackers. Can you explain to me more how to use container tabs?
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Earlier, I tried Google Chrome’s “profiles” but damn, how inconvenient they are. I ended up opening multiple windows.
Firefox, on the other hand, only uses a single window for multiple tab containers and accounts.
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which add on do you use?
I use Facebook Container which isolates any webpage that connects with facebook from the rest of my tabs. It also has separate containers for things like work, shopping, etc you can optionally use for whatever.
It’s very convenient to just open a “shopping” container tab to check my spam email address instead of opening a private window and needing to sign in each time.
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can’t go back.
Since version 120 is coming to mobile soon with about 200 extensions (as mentioned in the article), can anyone recommend some good extensions that are newly added? I have ublock origin, HD YouTube, Google search fixer, clear url fixer, dark reader, privacy badger, and ghostery
I think ghostery is owned by an ad company. I wouldn’t trust it.
Seriously? I had no idea. That’s kind of ironic if it is
Yeah, privacy badger and ghostery are no longer recommended, unlock origin will do their job (better).
What’s wrong with Privacy Badger? Isn’t that from EFF?
There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not needed if FF blocks all 3rd party cookies outright. Privacy Badger was supposed to autodetect which 3rd party cookies were used to track you, there’s no point if they’re all blocked.
If you have sites that need 3rd party cookies to work please note you can add exceptions in FF settings. I’ve seen instructions telling people to disable tracking protection altogether in that case but that’s a terrible idea.
Google rewrites links in Google search (not that you use it but maybe you do sometimes). So, if you want the links you click in Google search to not go through a Google referral URL and instead go to the link advertised in the search result, then Privacy Badger is useful for this purpose.
Do I need to adjust any settings?
I’m surprised I haven’t heard this before. Thanks! I will proceed to only use uBlock Origin from now on (although I really enjoy the auto-reject cookies)
Try libredirect, it automatically redirects links from twitter, youtube, imgur and many other spying platforms to alternative privacy friendly frontends. It is also very customizable: you can turn only some redirects and configure what particular site to use for each platform.
Good suggestion! I haven’t heard of this before and it seems like a great tool considering how much things have changed recently on these platforms
You’ve hit all the great ones, most of which were already available.
Have you added the bypass paywall clean filter list to ublock? Here’s the url you can copy paste under “import” in the ublock addon settings: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt
I haven’t done this. Thank you so much for this suggestion!
You don’t need Privacy Badger and Ghostery anymore if you turn the Enhanced Tracking Protection up to “strict” in settings.
Ghostery has been great for denying cookie pop-ups. I don’t think this setting will replace this feature?
Edit…
Nevermind. I just read this comment which suggests uBlock Origin can also handle cookies!
Oh even better! I would rather have settings in my browser instead of relying on extensions anyway. One of the many things I love about Firefox
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Thanks for the tip! That sounds like a great extension.
You can also drop ClearURLs filter. Better filters that are more up to date exists exists on uBlock like Adguard URL Tracking Protection and Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool.
I wasn’t aware. It really seems like uBlock origin can do everything I had all those extra extensions for! Pretty impressive
Yes. It’s really a powerful tool that helps to keep the Web tidy and sane.
What amazes me is how much of the web is practically unusable without it… And yet the majority of users don’t have it
Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
This is the first I’m seeing it, and it looks interesting. I’m always up to try a new browser. And it works on Linux too. If the language can be toggled to English I’ll definitely try it.
Their website is in Japanese but everything in the browser itself was English by default when I started using it!
Awesome, thank you for letting me know. That was really the sole concern I had, and it looks very promising. Thank you!
and waterfox!
and mullvad browser!
and “bolexforsoup already said mullvad an hour ago” browser!
I use it on desktop and phone and honestly been pretty good no complaints.
Mull for Android is also a really good alternative to Firefox on Android.
how does duckduckgo compare to mull for android?
