This December, if there's one tech New Year's resolution I'd encourage you to have, it's switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox's market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. There are two main reasons why switchin
  • appel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    58·
    11 months ago

    I switched back to Firefox a few months ago due to the incoming Manifest v3 debacle and I’m glad I did, it’s an excellent browser.

    • that guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      It’s really come a long way in the past few years. It used to be so slow when Chrome came in to take over

  • sep@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    11 months ago

    Agree compleatly. Been using firefox since it was called mosaic

      • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        11 months ago

        Yeah it went Mosaic, Netscape, Firefox iirc.

        Edit: And I think Netscape was a full rewrite as mosaic was owned by the university it was originally coded in, again iirc. That was a LONG time ago.

        • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          8·
          11 months ago

          Netscape was Firefox? Somehow I never learned that. I fuckin loved the little space animation when a page was loading.

          • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.worldEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            That’s because it’s not true. Firefox was first called firebird for a brief time… Otherwise its most closely related to the Mozilla browser… Netscape and mosaic aren’t even related to each other… I don’t know what this guy is smoking.

        • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          6·
          11 months ago

          Netscape was my first browser on the beige apple desktops in the elementary school computer lab. I knew about it going on to become Firefox but not of anything before that. I still miss some aspects of the internet of that time.

        • Great Blue Heron@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          So long ago that I had to go and use on a Sun workstation in the machine room because it wasn’t available for windows yet!

      • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        It wasn’t, this guy hasn’t a clue… Its original name was Firebird and they changed it to Firefox at version 3’s release. You could argue that it is somehow related to the Mozilla browser since it came from a related team but the Mozilla Foundation was also responsible for SeaMonkey as well.

        Mosaic was completely unrelated, same with netscape.

        • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I had heard Netscape being mentioned as it’s predecessor a number of times but never actually bothered to verify it. Looking them up on wikipedia would lead me to believe that they aren’t entirely unrelated with some absolute shit show of derivatives of licenced code from whichever browser I couldn’t tell for sure, which it also mentioned internet explorer being a result of. Looking as the articles for each browser and company is confusing as fuck and my pea brain can’t keep track of who each organization is and which is their browser. It sounds like a bunch of stuff that would never happen in current times.

          • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.worldEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            I mean I’m all for old guys flexing old guy knowledge. But I honestly feel sort of stupid for even trying to correct this one because it seems so fruitless.

            Software lineage does have some interesting things in it and one of my favorite infographics is the Linux variations family tree they have over on Wikipedia. But I don’t see any inherent value in tracking where browsers came from and who begot who from the biblical sense.

            Back in the day this produced some really large controversies and led to heavy litigation… https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years

            But now a days you really just need to decide what is important to you and find the right browser. Performance, compatibility, privacy, customization, integration… Etc… there is a browser for pretty much any application you can think of and generally speaking you are going to have some massive give and takes between them. No such thing as a perfect browser, though Links probably got the closest. 😆

  • fluckx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    11 months ago

    I’m mainly using Firefox on my devices and have zero regrets.

    I also enjoyed Vivaldi over the other chromium browsers. Still sticking with FF for now. The only issues I’ve had are Ms teams not loading, though km assuming that’s related to 3rd party cookies ( even though o365 outlook works fine ).

    MSteams is a dumpster fire in and of itself though. Even on my Windows pc it crashes when sharing my screen.

    • Einar@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      I switched mostly too. Cannot say that I have zero regrets, but FF is mostly up to what I need it to be. And where it isn’t, there’s Vivaldi.

      • ditty@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Yeah Firefox on Android sometimes refuses to load tabs and I have to quit and reopen it, it also still feels slow to load search results as well. Even with those flaws, I’m not switching back to Chromium browsers

        • fluckx@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          The Firefox add-ons help out with sticking with FF. I don’t think you can use add-ons in chromium browsers.

          Ghostery/ABP on my phone is convenient.

  • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    These are pretty terrible arguments.

    1. Google is a primarily advertising based company yes, but Apple and Microsoft aren’t
    2. You can’t compare chromium to IE - chromium is open source, and also it’s actually good
    • fossphi@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Chromium being open source actually means jack shit. It’s controlled by Google, one singular entity whose only desire is to maximise their iron grip on the internet to squeeze as much ad revenue as they can.

      This isn’t hyperbole, look at the recent WEI stuff or manifest v3 crap. Time and again, these corporations have showed that they just don’t give a shit about the free and open internet.

      Which leads to the first point, (Microsoft does seem to be moving pretty heavily into advertising though with all the bs in windows 11), you absolutely can not in good conscience use a big tech product with the argument that they’re not an ad company. It’s not just the ads which is the issue here. And the problem is sooner or later they’ll realise they’ve a trove of monetisable data, so might as well do something with it. And then we’ll have no choice because there will be no free and open alternatives left

    • chocolatine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      The issue is the rendering engine monopoly. Apple and Microsoft browsers as well as chromium all use chrome rendering engine making them basically the same browser under the hood.

      • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        That’s not true - Apple’s browsers use WebKit. I wish they used chromium though, Safari is basically the new IE.

        Having all browsers use the same, open source, modern and powerful rendering engine has many benefits. It makes web development MUCH easier, improves user experience because websites work the same on all browsers (apart from any proprietary stuff the browser vendors might add on top of chromium, but that’s not chromium’s fault), and greatly speeds up adoption of new web standards.

        I don’t want there to be a Chrome browser monopoly for obvious reasons but I don’t see the downside of every browser using the same rendering engine as long as it’s not controlled by any one entity

  • Geek_King@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    I switched back to Firefox maybe 9 or 10 months ago after using opera gx for a while. Firefox had been great, and I love that they keep fighting the good fight, so to speak.

  • TheMadnessKing@lemdro.idEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    Any Alternative to Brave? I have FF as primary browser but for some websites which tends to break on FF, I would like to use something non-Chrome/Brave on Windows.

    • SendMePhotos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Trading the article, the CEO is meeting the assigned goals exceptionally well. The CEO does not give themselves the raise per se, but the board does, right?

      As it turns out, moving away from Firefox is exactly Mozilla’s plan.

      Earlier this year, Mozilla laid out their vision for the future of their organization – and it did not include Firefox.  The focus for the future of Mozilla – according to Mozilla – is primarily based around Artificial Intelligence services.

      In fact, Mozilla leadership stated, quite plainly, that they intend to take Mozilla “in a different direction.”

      When you consider the goals of Mozilla… the decreasing Firefox marketshare is no longer much of a concern.  In fact, moving revenue away from Firefox, while investing in A.I. systems (and other subscription services) becomes the primary goal.

  • DirtyCNC@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    If you’re reading this and not using Firefox, do yourself a favor and don’t wait until 2024 to switch.

    • platypus_plumba@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I’ve had many problems with Firefox that always push me back to Chrome. It seems some web pages are only created with Chrome in mind. I really don’t know about browser specs but I’m guessing a front-end app must have a lot of “if chrome, then; else if Mozilla then;” logic to handle specific browser interfaces or features.

      Apparently some apps don’t care about Mozilla and they just don’t work. It’s also pretty hard to tell that the issue is Mozilla, it takes me like 15m to switch to chrome and then “ahhhh… it was the browser”.

      I really want to help Mozilla by using it, but I just can’t under those conditions.

      • fifisaac@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        What sites are these? I’ve not had this in years and when there is problems the site normally says unsupported browser rather than leaving me to guess

        • DirtyCNC@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Other than YouTube, which purposefully slows Firefox down, I only ever encountered one webpage in years where the issue was 100% “caused” by my browser choice – the left pane (lesson list) in my school’s tutoring platform would not scroll due to what I assume was a trivial HTML oversight. After reporting the issue, they insisted that they would not support browsers other than ones based on Chromium and Safari and tried to convince me to switch. I don’t have access to the site anymore and I did not understand web development at all back then so I could not create a patch myself; I just worked around the issue using a very tall, zoomed-out “mobile view” to reach the off-screen buttons.

  • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Opera works well with Twitch, but I haven’t done any detailed stat analysis on usage. The trade off between it and FF is (with my GPU focused browser settings) Firefox with higher CPU usage/temp(by maybe 1-2 degrees, negligible) and opera with higher GPU usage(but lower cpu temps/usage, as stated above). Since Opera is Chrome-built, it’s in a walled garden deal, when possible.

    • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      11 months ago

      Opera is the biggest piece of shit in existence, as it sends all of your data to a weird Chinese company. They also make use of shady marketing practices and constantly lie to their users.

        • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          11 months ago

          I really don’t see a reason to use a proprietary browser in 2023. Firefox is the best in my opinion. Chromium and anything based on it is bad for the open internet. Google shouldn’t be able to control the entire web through their browser engine. Firefox is the only viable alternative.

          • Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            5·
            11 months ago

            You’re preaching to the choir Firefox is my daily driver. Opera is just what I’m using with Twitch to see if it’s more efficient.

            • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              11 months ago

              Ok then I misunderstood your comment. Maybe I shouldn’t use Lemmy while I’m drunk. Is there a reason why efficiency is so important? Do you use a laptop with poor battery life?