Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

I keep seeing Edge mentioned as a worthy alternative, and I just don&#x27;t get it.<p>First, all Chromium-based browsers will eventually block uBlock Origin for the sole reason that they can&#x27;t maintain Manifest v2 on their own, and they all rely on Chrome&#x27;s Web Store anyway. This won&#x27;t happen immediately because Manifest v2 will probably stick around for longer because of enterprise users, but the writing is on the wall.<p>Then there&#x27;s the fact that Edge is just Microsoft&#x27;s spyware, being worse in my book than Google&#x27;s Chrome. And people forget that Microsoft is also an advertising company. Even if that&#x27;s not their main revenue source, they also hate your ad-blockers.<p>In the EU, when you open Edge for the first time, they ask you to agree to sharing your personal data with the entire advertising industry, via an IAB dialog. And there&#x27;s no way to workaround it, you have to answer it (with the rejection being an agreement to <i>“legitimate interest”</i> claims, which are BS). Google&#x27;s Chrome does not do this, and searching on google.com only asks for sharing of data with Google itself.<p>Edge also exposes an advertising ID, meant for Bing&#x27;s Ads, much like what Chrome does for Google. And in true Microsoft spirit, it also has telemetry, which you can&#x27;t turn off.<p>Edge doesn&#x27;t end-to-end encrypt your synchronized data. Compared with Chrome, which at least supports an <i>“encryption passphrase”</i> that does e2e encryption. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Chrome is also cursed because with a passphrase, they don&#x27;t synchronize all your history. And also, they keep turning on that option for sharing your browsing history with Google, for the purpose of improving search. But in terms of what browser is more adversarial towards users, Edge is worse, IMO.<p>And Edge is hard-coded to use Bing. It&#x27;s harder to use Edge without Bing or Microsoft&#x27;s online services, than it is to use Chrome without Google. Personally, I don&#x27;t want my browser to tie me to certain online services.<p>Seriously, Edge is just Microsoft&#x27;s spyware and a piece of crap. Other Chromium alternatives, like Vivaldi or Brave, are better, firstly because they aren&#x27;t so adversarial. Or if you&#x27;re on macOS, give Arc a try.

FWIW I got annoyed with chrome&#x27;s distracting home screen, and pondered how long it would take for a 10+ year chrome user to switch to firefox. The answer (on macOS) was 5 minutes. I was shocked how easy it was (and, frankly, how similar it was). When you first open firefox, it gives options to import all your chrome settings (including saved passwords etc). Super cool.

I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more.<p>I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.<p>It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.<p>I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun&#x2F;Oracle. etc.<p>Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking &quot;Oh! This might be worth a look&quot; - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section.<p>(which is what I have been doing for years. lol)<p>I just don&#x27;t understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone &quot;for advertising&quot; purposes.<p>I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will.<p>Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.

Use whatever makes you happy.<p>But it&#x27;s worth pointing out that Chrome and Chromium are developed by Google. The whole point of using Chromium as a browser developer (Brave, Edge, Opera, ...) is to have Google own and take care of all the difficult bits, drive the technical roadmap, and decide on what is and isn&#x27;t going to be in the next version. So, you don&#x27;t gain much by switching to those as the teams behind those Chromium based alternatives don&#x27;t actually develop most of the browser and you are not really cutting loose from Google. Brave does a little more than others but still.<p>Sticking with Chrome&#x2F;Chromium is a bit of a form of Stockholm syndrome. People keep convincing themselves it isn&#x27;t that bad and that the ads are fine and not that intrusive and that Google means well. Etc.<p>Firefox is technically independent; not financially. It and Safari are the only non Chromium based browsers left in addition to a small number of early stage attempts to implement a browser that don&#x27;t look like they are going to be a credible alternative any time soon. Google is paying both Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine in their browser. And unlike Mozilla, Apple isn&#x27;t exactly dependent on charity and also getting a lot more from Google than Mozilla because they have hundreds of millions of iphone users. Browser real estate is valuable; especially on mobile.<p>But we live in a weird world where we are dependent on a single company financing the development of essentially all browsers that are commonly used through advertising. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s particularly healthy and especially the Apple deal smells like a classic anti competitive move that ought to trigger some legal action. It would be nice to see the search and browser markets open up a bit. Especially on mobile. Especially on IOS where Apple enforces a Safari monopoly. Every other browser has to use the Safari rendering engine.

The article is bollocks. Recommending Pale Moon in 2023 is plain irresponsible. No process isolation&#x2F;sandboxing for tabs&#x2F;websites&#x2F;addons, playing constant catch-up with Firefox on implementing security fixes&#x2F;mitigations (made more difficult by how far back the fork has happened), disregarding all the optimizations that brought Firefox closer to being on par with Chrome (which translates to higher power usage).<p>In my opinion Pale Moon should never be recommended as an alternative to Chrome for the average person; it should be seen as a specialized tool for people who are willing to trade away security and performance for customization. If you don&#x27;t have customization needs that are this specific, using it is a net loss.

Mozilla get a lot of funding directly from Google for making Google the default search site [0]. Seems to me that this may be a problem going forward if Mozilla continue to allow ad blockers in Firefox.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;newsletters&#x2F;2023-05-05&#x2F;why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;newsletters&#x2F;2023-05-05&#x2F;why-go...</a>

On MacOS, consider Orion Browser by Kagi.<p>Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design, and native support for web extensions.<p>Orion offers native support for many Firefox and Chrome browser extensions allowing access to the world&#x27;s largest eco-system of browser extensions. Even UBlock Origin.<p>Not that you need it, since Orion has been engineered from ground up as a truly privacy-respecting <i>zero telemetry</i> browser.<p>Your private information will never leave Orion by default, and to protect your privacy on the web, Orion comes with industry-leading anti-tracking technology as well as a powerful built-in ad-blocker.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;</a>

I switched to Google Chrome when it came out (14 years ago according to Wikipedia) and to Chromium when I got sufficiently annoyed by Google. In August I switched back to Firefox. Here are some thoughts:<p>- the experience is 90% the same. - Sync between Android app and desktop is just as flawless (that one made me switch back to Chromium on my first try a few years ago) - Theming is nicer - switching between home and work profile is great with the profile switcher extension - Firefox seems less well integrated into many websites. I keep entering my credit card info on many sites, because the option to use saved cards either does not appear or does not work. Same is true for suggesting passwords. So I use keepass&#x27; for both now (which might be good) -the developer tools are a little annoying. I use them mainly for Web scraping and sometimes I give up and copy the curl call from Chromium because the formatting is nicer and the network tab looks cleaner<p>I won&#x27;t switch back to Chrome and miss it less and less. Only during black Friday and when I taught my webscraping course I missed Chromium a little.

Even when chrome was new, it was known that it included heavy tracking by google. I briefly checked out iron back in the day, a chromium version without google tracking. But I realised that even just opening the settings resulted in requests to google (for some spelling library if I remember correctly). So obviously it was difficult to remove all the tracking, and it was clear that it would be difficult to keep removing it in all versions. Also it was clear already back then that google would try to capture as much of the browser market as possible, to control the browser, many online services, and just get the power to do whatever it wants. Now they are pushing hard for DRM in the browser, to take power away from the user. Firefox is definitely not perfect, but back in 2008 it was obvious that we, the users, should not support chrome. So I stayed with firefox, and don&#x27;t need to swtich back now.

I love Firefox, but for some reason I can&#x27;t pull away from Brave at the moment for my daily driver. Time will tell how long they can hold out against the changes that will eventually filter into chromium. I see the future of adblocking etc being put back to the network side, things like piHole should get a &#x27;new&#x27; lease of life.

What makes some folks so attached to particular browsers?<p>Personally, I&#x27;m using a mix of Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. While in theory I could just use one of them (which would probably be Firefox), it&#x27;s kinda like having 3 different super-profiles for a web-browser (where each browser is its own super-profile), so I&#x27;m mostly just using all 3 out of laziness.<p>I don&#x27;t particularly trust Chrome nor Edge, so I just don&#x27;t use them for anything important. Not that I&#x27;m 100% confident in Firefox, but if I&#x27;ve got to do something important, Firefox is the easy pick. Then I guess I end up favoring Chrome or Edge for everything else, since I don&#x27;t want to junk up Firefox with nonsense (so Firefox&#x27;ll remain solid for when it&#x27;s appropriate). Between Chrome and Edge, I guess I favor Chrome for junk-level tasks since Chrome feels the most separated (being neither used for important stuff like Firefox nor being tied to the OS like Edge).<p>I get that some folks might have a business-critical app with compatibility-issues limiting their freedom-of-choice when it comes to certain tasks, but outside of such niche cases, what&#x27;s the big deal?

For those who can&#x27;t switch away from Chrome extensions yet I recommend trying Vivaldi<p>Made by Opera browser Founder<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com</a>

Friends complain of FF being slower than Chrome for some actions. The CEO of Mozilla is accused of lots of things. Still - the whole Google&#x2F;Chrome monopoly and tracking is just another level of irritation and I’d happily love to see and use alternatives in both browser and search. FF is absolutely okay for everyday use even the betas are quite stable. Give it a try, guys. It’s worth the effort.

Highly recommend brave (with all the crypto nonsense shut off), it&#x27;s a pretty fast browser, nice features and works with chrome extensions. I&#x27;ve used it successfully for the past 3 or something years

My problem with Firefox is that a new Firefox windows can only be launched from the same environment (or only from a child process?) from which the first window has been started. Even the same user who started FF cannot launch a new window from a new shell. That constantly interferes with my workflow.<p>Example: Say firefox has been started from the Destop already and now I want to start a new Firefox window from a root terminal:<p><pre><code> su desktopuser firefox </code></pre> It does not work. It gives me &quot;Firefox is already running, but is not responding.&quot;.

Please, Firefox, for the love of everything, add a good, easy, natively integrated, one-click-to-enable vertical tab list like Edge&#x27;s. That&#x27;s the only thing keeping me on Microsoft Edge and it&#x27;s a dealbreaker for me. The extensions that add ones are just not as good.

I tried moving to Firefox a year ago but found that the lack of Tab Groups really killed me.<p>There are several extensions that try to emulate this behaviour, but I didn&#x27;t find that they worked particularly well. And then there are the security concerns.<p>I guess when Chrome break uBlock Origin next year I&#x27;ll give Edge a go, or one of the various chromium builds

I&#x27;ve switched from Chrome to Firefox couple years ago. Very happy with ad blocking. The few problem are: PayPal asks for an SMS code way too often, some PayPal checkout flows don&#x27;t work and occasionally some website form isn&#x27;t functional because they didn&#x27;t test in Firefox - for those cases I just open Chrome.

Some interesting data point in the discussion is in the unlock origin wiki article.<p>„ As of January 2021, the uBlock Origin Chrome extension had over 10 million active users and the Firefox version had 5 million active users „<p>There are 5-10 times more chrome users then Firefox . Chrome users are for some reasons using less ublock then Firefox users.

Although I personally use Firefox and actively promote its use, I believe that a significant number of users may not be aware of the developments and will continue to stick with Chrome.<p>From a pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense to advocate for the rights of Chrome users as well, even in the presence of alternatives.

I have been using many different browsers over the years. I regularly use safari, firefox, chrome, and occasionally even Edge and so on.<p>I keep going back to firefox. Why? It has some power-features I haven&#x27;t really found in many other browsers. It lets you easily explicitly search through your tabs (% in url bar). It has first party plugin for containers, letting you log in to multiple accounts on the same domain without having to log out all the time. It&#x27;s also worth noting that Rust, the language, as far as I understand was essentially invented to make features in firefox memory safe.<p>With all the praise for firefox, it should be mentioned that their business model is centered around passing on searches to google.

ublock origin and not ublock. there is a very important distinction. please fix this

Honestly I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for more than 10 years and never felt the need to switch. Every time I try a new browser there&#x27;s features from Firefox that I end up missing. And seeing the shitshow with the ad blockers in Chrome there&#x27;s no way I&#x27;m trying that lol.

I&#x27;ve found two major roadblocks when switching browsers: 1. Migrating your passwords, 2. Migrating the bookmarks.<p>If you use an external password manager (Bitwarden, 1Password, even KeePassXC) and an external bookmark manager (Raindrop is excellent, Pocket is barely usable) then switching browsers becomes very easy – to the point where you could switch to a new one every month if you wanted. The browser is no longer a place where you store your stuff, it just becomes a UI to browse the internet.

These days i am switching between Firefox and Brave browser.<p>Missing functionality in Firefox:<p>* WebSerial&#x2F;WebUSB - needed for IoT projects, flashing devices like drones etc..<p>* Firefox Android honestly feels a lot slower than Brave on my device.<p>* For some odd reason Google Meet has stopped working on my Firefox since last month.<p>* Touchscreen support by default on my 2in1 laptop.<p>* Super annoying to have to restart firefox whenever i do a firefox upgrade via. package manager<p>Missing functionality in Brave: * Proper Tree style tab.<p>* RAM usage is probably not as low as Firefox

Is there an extension which stores a history of all my visited tabs, also with some kind of window id in order to group them per window?<p>I&#x27;m not talking about the integrated history which will be lost when cleared (and may have a limit of how long entries are kept)<p>I&#x27;ve (and Google as well) found my Chrome&#x27;s Activity History to be pretty useful when I need to search for something I was looking for years ago.

I would, if Mozilla focused on features users want :)

To add to the other anecdotes here:<p>I&#x27;ve always used multiple browsers at the same time. On my local workstation I used Edge (used to be Chrome) for corporate and customer stuff, Firefox for everything else. Firefox runs faster with less headaches than the others, even with ADO, which is funny to me.<p>When I encounter environments where only Chrome is available (e.g., jump box or application server in a customer&#x27;s network) I have to deal with Chrome eating up too many resources. I often have to kill other users inactive sessions due to how much memory their Chrome process is using. I&#x27;ve seen it affect production performance due to it eating up so much memory.<p>The only user app I&#x27;ve seen that sometimes uses more memory on those customer hosted systems is Oracle SQL Developer.<p>Firefox is simply better for me. However, I won&#x27;t argue with others on personal preference, hence why I don&#x27;t just uninstall Chrome where I find it. Also I don&#x27;t want those people to lose their bookmarks and browsing history.

I use both Firefox and Brave.<p>No, I am not disturbed by Braves &quot;involvement with crypto&quot;. It took me all of 3 minutes to deactivate every crypto-feature the browser has, they are pretty obvious in the settings. It forces nothing on me, works great, and the best builtin anti-tracking features of a non-TOR browser I have ever seen.<p>I have yet to check out Vivaldi browser.

One of the impediments in migrating to another software are different UIs. Let&#x27;s forget for a second that Chrome and Firefox have a really, really similar UI for the sake of this example.<p>Let&#x27;s also discard that UI is changed for the sake of itself. It has changed to benefit the software somehow. How to get around the need for someone to redesign the UI and the expectation of a user to have a same routine workflow every day?<p>Standardize more keyboard shortcuts. Standardize important browser settings under a tree, with prescribed OIDs and such. Start supporting keyboard workflows for all the actions in the software.<p>Keyboard is the most stable interface there is. Everyone looking to advance in his domain needs to start using the keyboard. Even if you&#x27;re in construction, engineering, architecture, visual design, you&#x27;ll find out your software suite has extensive shortcuts and macros or scripting that can boost your productivity N-fold.

Am I the only person who is obsessed with Autoplaying media? Ads are one thing, but even a news site or blog that immediately blasts moving pictures greatly bothers me. Very often you hit a small X which then doesn&#x27;t do its job as an X, instead moving the media into a floating window.<p>X is the new &quot;open in separate window&quot;<p>Chrome is vicious when it comes to forcing auto play.<p>Brave+Turn off Scripts works great.<p>Turning off scripts helps in many other ways to make the web more readable. Wait, I should emphasize my unique use-case here: in contrast to apparently the vast majority of web users, I actually like reading words, and sometimes the words are a whole page long. When flashy, talky, moving stuff is in between the sentences and words, they become difficult and frustrating to read.

If there ever was an anti-trust argument to be made against Google this is it. You don&#x27;t want a dominant search company, dominant advertiser <i>and</i> a browser vendor to be the same entity (or closely related).<p>At the same time: this also goes for Microsoft&#x2F;Edge.

Firefox is an amazing browser. Especially since they finally fixed Webauthn on Linux a couple months ago, so I can log in with my yubikeys in passwordless mode. It was the last thing I still used chrome for sometimes.

I use Safari with AdGuard and everything works perfectly fine. I like &quot;hide my email&quot; feature so much from iCloud that this is a dealbreaker now. As well as obvious password sharing with the iPhone.

I use Chrome profiles to separate my work and personal (and other) identities. This is helpful per se, but of course especially helpful because my different identities have different Google accounts.<p>Last time I looked, Firefox lacked this feature. This isn&#x27;t the use case for Firefox &quot;Containers&quot; and indeed they could not be used for it. There was something very inconvenient involving starting Firefox with different command line flags to create instances with different profiles. For this reason I could not switch to Firefox.

Firefox even supports uBlock Origin on Android. It&#x27;s priceless.

One of the best things about switching to Firefox was that it has the option to &quot;Close tabs to the Left&quot;. I never understood why you can&#x27;t do that natively in Chrome.

It&#x27;s weird to me that no one on <i>Hacker News</i> has pointed out the MV3 version of uBlock works fine. At least I haven&#x27;t noticed any difference except for the rare minor annoyance of cosmetic filtering (which gorhill removed for political, not technical reasons)<p>Whatever you feel about the politics surrounding MV2 and webRequest, MV3 is by no means <i>blocking</i> uBlock, or ending adblock on Chrome across the board. That&#x27;s FUD.<p>It&#x27;s far more convincing to speak about the on-the-ground technical facts than the paranoia of these gossip rags.

Unfortunately, Firefox isn&#x27;t quite keeping up.<p>One issue is that for me at least, Firefox crashes too often, and when it does, the entire browser goes away, not just the tab. That&#x27;s annoying.<p>Another issue is that something seems to be lacking performance-wise. I messed around a bit with Invoke AI, and the canvas is painfully slow even on modern, high end hardware. I thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it&#x27;s silky smooth in Chromium.

I stopped trying to understand why people don&#x27;t use firefox. It&#x27;s been the only browser worth using since opera died. Vivaldi is a fun toy, but it&#x27;s still got chromium baggage that keeps it from true greatness.<p>Now, where&#x27;s the arm64 linux builds? Currently have to rely on the distro or build it yourself. Is it too much to ask of their automation?

I&#x27;m like 50&#x2F;50 on firefox(for linux).<p>Spotify doesnt work on it. I have far more issues rendering 5,000x5x000 px images on firefox than Chrome. Might not be an issue for most people, but when doing AI art and making 10x10 images, it is common.<p>After a side by side comparison, I use chrome for nearly everything. I weirdly use firefox for everything google services lol.

I love the firefox screenshot feature that they have making it easier to screenshot specific div&#x2F;containers

I would consider Firefox if Mozilla wasn&#x27;t a total sucker for Google&#x27;s money. They&#x27;ll get onboard with anything google does sooner or later. As it stands now, I don&#x27;t see much difference between aligning with either of them.

One additional bit of recommendation for Firefox: the Tridacyl extension only works on it.<p>It&#x27;s a vim motions extension that works much better than the ones on Chrome&#x2F;Brave. You can use it on every page except the Firefox settings, etc.

My main issue with Firefox is the unavailability of a decent profile switching. I know there&#x27;s some hacky way to get the profile system done, but it is not comparable with Chrome&#x27;s current profile-switching

Some people say use browser that supports manifest v2 extensions, but where will anybody find such extensions? I think Google will remove all manifest v2 extensions eventually from their store.

This is the beauty of the Web - an open set of protocols and standards. You just change whatever you want: browser, server, language interpreter, proxy, etc. This is highly underappreciated.

If you plan on switching to Firefox, consider using an User-Agent extension that tricks Google web apps into thinking they&#x27;re interacting with Chrome. Improves performance for me.

Coming out swinging saying Safari is a Big Tech Privacy Invader, and then providing no further commentary on why.<p>You can say many things about Safari, but I don&#x27;t recall that being one of them.

Is it weird that Google should go to all the effort to advertise Chrome as much as they do? I&#x27;m thinking of the las Vegas grand Prix, and the sphere lit up like a big chrome ball

How is Internet Explorer mainstream browser? It has finally died and can&#x27;t even be used anymore on Windows (unless you&#x27;re running some old version with updates turned off)

YouTube? Chrome? uBlock? Firefox? What&#x27;s all this fuss about?<p>Just avoid the youtube.com domain like pest, period.<p>Set up a Piped instance or use your favourite one. You even get your playlists and subscriptions over RSS feeds instead of using Google&#x27;s stinky, unstandardized and limited APIs, how cool is that? And wire it to Platypush + yt-dlp if you want the ability to scrape the media URL and cast it wherever you like.<p>If you still go directly to youtube.com to consume videos, without even using a Piped proxy as a digital condom, then it&#x27;s your own fault. Ad blockers can only do that much against overtly hostile businesses that have enough engineering resources to invest in their overtly hostile practices.<p>What else is Google supposed to do to tell you that you can&#x27;t trust them with anything? Is Sundar Pichai supposed to wear an evil mask like a Marvel villain before you understand that that company and whatever it touches is rotten and morally bankrupt to its core, that the only thing that prevents them from turning their products into big billboards with zero added value is the backlash from their own users, and that they&#x27;re trying to find a sweet spot where they can enshittify their user experience to a point where they maximize the money they make out of data collection and ads, but without pushing too much to the point that too many users leave the platform?<p>The only way out is for EVERYONE to STOP sending a single direct byte to youtube.com. Pirate the shit out of them. And I honestly don&#x27;t give a f*k anymore about hurting the creators that are still on YouTube. If you&#x27;re a creator still publishing videos on that sewage, even if so many alternatives are available today, then you&#x27;re part of the problem, and I no longer care if you lose your revenue.

An interesting thing about posts like this: you would recommend, and you think everybody is using Firefox. But in fact everybody’s using Chrome Firefox user base is just so tiny

I use Librewolf (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net</a>) which is a fork of firefox and truly privacy oriented.

With uBlock Origin working as it works best on Firefox, I get a 3-5 sec lag on launch [0] as it prepares the browser to block ads.<p>With Chrome, the launch happens in an instant. I should also mention that Firefox has always had a slow start up time on my machine.<p>While am sure there is a setting to turn the uBlock feature off, it probably won&#x27;t make enough of a difference to beat Chrome&#x27;s start up time.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox#browser-launch">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-b...</a>

The only thing I miss from chrome is the easy tab grouping.

Wish can see more of these from mainstream&#x2F;corporate medias, so I can just share them on Facebook&#x2F;iMessage&#x2F;Whatsapp with Friends &amp; Family.

Google is effectively willing to sacrifice part of their moat to reenforce their core. Is this move born out of (over)confidence, or desperation?

I&#x27;m happy with my Lynx&#x2F;w3m browsers.

I don&#x27;t get why FF is mainly advertised as a &#x27;privacy first&#x27; browser. I think most people first want ease of use and features, not privacy. And for them, Firefox may look like a niche program only for those who are paranoid or have something to hide. But in my opinion even if we don&#x27;t count privacy, Firefox will still be a serious contender in all other areas and winner in many. At least for me it&#x27;s not privacy that wins.

Firefox for Android, unfortunately, is plagued with UX issues, which makes switching much more difficult.<p>I cannot even render HN well.

Edge is easy to switch to and could be a great way to break the Chrome dominance.<p>Safari also started catching up over the last 2 years

Librewolf is a conspicuous omission from a list of privacy-focused browsers that (for some reason) includes Brave.

My Firefox says its DNS-over-HTTPS provider (default Cloudflare) can&#x27;t find this domain. I wonder why?

I would but only Vivaldi lets me customize all app shortcuts. Vimium doesn’t always work in Firefox.

While switching would be nice, you don&#x27;t have to. You can just use Firefox to browse YouTube.

Anyone knows if that manifest v3 is going to be pushed into Brave and similar chromium browsers?

I almost exclusively use Firefox personally and Chrome for work.<p>I couldn&#x27;t switch to Chrome for work because some google services are randomly broken on Firefox.<p>At time google drive will fail to load at all (not that it&#x27;s great on chrome either) and YouTube uploads will randomly break. UI claims it&#x27;s uploading but no network activity at all and upload is stalled.

uBO also works well in Firefox Android, which is much less well known than it should be.

All I really need is 1Password, and I just installed that extension. Let&#x27;s do it!

I really hope uBo for Safari would get some love thanks to chrome banning

Because I don&#x27;t want to support the (in)actions of the Mozilla Foundation

Unpopular opinion: I don&#x27;t care about &#x27;privacy&#x27;.

What’s the website support of Firefox like? I tried switching to Safari last year and a small minority of websites didn’t work as expected. Even though it was small, it was a big enough problem that I switched back to Chrome.

If you’re on Mac, try Safari. Otherwise, yes, go Firefox.

Don&#x27;t Google give Mozilla lots of money? Presumably at some point they will just stipulate that blocking WebRequest be made unsupported?<p>I mean, speaking as a Firefox user who never switched in the first place.

Never gave up on Firefox, still my primary browser.

The problem with FF I find is being a bit slower on the uptake of new features. WebGPU being the current best example. It&#x27;s annoying to have to swap to Edge for specific pages.

I just use Adguard as a system-level ad blocker. Works in every browser, and unlike simple DNS filtering it can inject userscripts.

or any other browser that is not Chrome; Brave, Vivaldi (which use the same engine) or Firefox.

The moment uBlock Origin stops working I&#x27;m switching to Firefox. Websites are completely unusable without an ad blocker.

Honestly, in Google&#x27;s eyes, nothing of value will be lost here. And Firefox gaining some market share will help get regulators off their back, so it&#x27;s a win-win

(semi-sarcastic post ensues:)<p>Folks.. come on.. some of us have invested in Google stock (ok.. it&#x27;s not much, but it is what it is). And for the Google stock to go up people have to use Android without a firewall, Chrome browser in all their devices, Gmail, and so on.. so they be tracked, their data to be harvested and sold x10000 so that the ad machine makes billions and the stock price goes up.<p>I decided to STOP pestering my friends on switching to Signal, Firefox, etc. and instead I just bought stocks of Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.. Since people don&#x27;t want to protect their own privacy and the one of their children, and I cannot help them.. well then I can help myself.<p>I will &#x27;forever&#x27; use FF and suggest it ONCE to friends and family, and then move on with my life (on the &#x27;consulting friends &amp; family on privacy focused solutions).<p>EDIT: Unfortunately I am not joking on the above.. it made me throw up a bit in my mouth the first time I sat down and bought Google and Meta stock (I was a mutual funds guy until then). I use &quot;dollar cost averaging&quot; so I buy a little, but very often (monthly). I got tired of debating with people on why THEIR privacy is CRITICAL for them and their children. Insurance companies will screw them in the future, Pedophiles are monitoring their instagram, Google (and everyone they sell the data to) knowing where they keep and spend their money, Google knowing who they email and what&#x2F;when&#x2F;why&#x2F;etc. It is insane what type and how much data &#x27;we&#x27; are freely giving away, only to bite us in the a$$. For me the cost-benefit of convenience vs what-will-come is very much against us.

I think you mean, Time so switch to Brave!?

gentle reminder that chrome people are doing &quot;web environment integrity&quot; bullshit. use firefox or any non-chrome based browser if you like the open and free web.

When I open the firefox I see the following [0]interface rows :<p>1. previows&#x2F;next | history | Menubar-bookmarks button | --URL BAR-- | reload | home | some addons | Decentral eyes | CookieAutoDelete | uMatrix | uBlockOrigin | Multi-Acount containers | Addons icon | Menu bar icon |.<p>2. Toolbar-bookmarks row | Button for unfolding the bookmarks that don&#x27;t fit in such row.<p>3. Pinned tabs (they are only icons) | &lt; | Tab_1, Tab_2, Tab_3, ... | &gt; | + | unfold vertical list of the opened tabs |.<p>4. The page for the selected Tab.<p>This allows us to use two bookmarks visual groups, the ones that are unfolded through the Menubar-bookmarks, and the ones always visible when Toolbar-bookmarks are enabled (what in reality is a subfolder from menubar&#x27;s bookmarks) and are shown as 2nd row in my interface. Also the easy access to Containers and the CookieAutoDelete, uMatrix, uBlockOrigin current page options are essential.<p>In the Toolbar-bookmarks, for being able to visually have more folders as &quot;quick access&quot; row line, I use acronyms as folder names (just for the first ones until fill that space). This between separators, and also mere url icons bookmarks (by removing the bookmark title name its just showed the page icon).<p>When one push one those folders are unfold all the related sub-folders and sub-bookmarks.<p>Also, equally important, the folders and bookmarks that don&#x27;t fit in such row are easily accessible by pushing an icon at the right corner, what unfolds a vertical list with the rest the bookmarks. This is important because in such toolbar one usually have several hundreds of independent bookmarks and folders by topics, with infinite sub-folders and their respective bookmarks, etc.<p>This let us in Firefox with:<p>Pinned tabs, the current session opened tabs, the usability of to have the Toolbar-bookmarks with folders as topics by clicking the folder or icon, and a second different visual group of bookmarks through Menubar-bookmarks. By other side, if one want to add to those folders&#x2F;topics the page that is being visited it&#x27;s just needed to drag and drop the url there. Also all those bookmarks&#x27; folders have their option for to open their content in tabs.<p>I cannot think of browsing comfortably without such an interface and tools as a starting point.<p>[0] Thankfully and fortunately, with Firefox it is possible to have a browser focused in usability by enabling its options, and also to do adjustments in the interface under our needs with custom stylesheets. By default in FF the tabs are shown over the url bar, but in my case I use as base [1]customcssforfx for to put the tabs under toolbar-bookmarks, and from there I add a couple of lines with custom padding, sizes and icons. [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aris-t2&#x2F;customcssforfx">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aris-t2&#x2F;customcssforfx</a>

Use Brave instead!

yeessirr

Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunduke.locals.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;4387539&#x2F;firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunduke.locals.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;4387539&#x2F;firefox-money-invest...</a>

why is this absolutely oblivious, joke of an article voted so high? web browsers are bloated and insecure, and there is practically no difference between them. tor browser tries (keyword) to reduce fingerprintability to make tor actually work as intended, beyond that there is no difference between firefox. icecat, palemoon, and all those forks are just firefox with 0.01% of the bloat removed. any &quot;privacy&quot; or &quot;security&quot; plugin just increases your attack surface and makes your fingerprint more unique (and 99% of websites collect this fingerprint and use it).<p>browsers are bloated and unfixable. consuming &quot;privacy&quot; and &quot;security&quot; products does not fix this.<p>&gt; Mullvad Browser: Best Built-in VPN Support<p>this text is literally written by a bot

There are many other good Chromium-based web browsers. Arc, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi...

FF has so many bugs, it literally unusable.

Isnt Firefox trying to copy EXACTLY what Chrome is doing with extensions?

Sadly Firefox doesn’t translate most languages like Danish in the iOS app. They have chosen not to add that feature for some reason. It rules out Firefox for me because I want bookmark and history syncing between mobile and PC. A LOT of people are waiting for better language support on iOS.

I won&#x27;t use Firefox due to the way Mozilla is wasting its money and mismanaging its projects.

I really, really want to switch from Vivaldi to Firefox, but I am just too accustomed to the workflow. The interface is too slick and it &quot;just works&quot;.<p>I use vertical tabs with different workspaces, and although I am aware I can do it with extensions or userchrome in Firefox, I&#x27;ve found both variants pretty rough and unpolished -- and I don&#x27;t have the time and energy to polish stuff that bothers me.<p>The biggest question for me is why nobody creates browsers based on FF engine and everyone uses chromium as a backbone for the browser. I would love to see something like Vivaldi or nyxt based on FF engine.

Firefox looks ugly, I really can&#x27;t accept it. The only way of it looking less ugly is to do some unofficial tweaks which break from version to version. I was a Firefox user for years until they&#x27;ve changed the UI, and now I can&#x27;t go back because of how it LOOKS.<p>Also, the Mozilla ideology. Why can&#x27;t the browser be just a piece of software and that&#x27;s it?<p>I just use Vivaldi.<p>Edit: I can sense that Firefox zealotry is strong in this topic. People who downvote: you don&#x27;t accept that someone has a different aesthetics than you, or what&#x27;s the reason? That just reinforces my choice to stay away, people who Mozilla attracts are not really on the same wavelength as me I guess.

Don&#x27;t switch to FF if you&#x27;re a heavy user. I am on Firefox as my main browser for web and mobile since 4 years.<p>I am just in the process of switching back to Chrome, as Firefox got continuously worse over time. Can&#x27;t handle lots of tabs, crashes&#x2F;freezes randomly, weird UI bugs... It&#x27;s just very disappointing :&#x2F;.