@bladecoder please send a similar post that will hopefully fare as well as this one, but craft it to address the web developers who build their pages or sites on–and for– Chrome without testing their stuff elsewhere 🙏
More often than not, we web users find that forms or web experiences really, don’t work or not as intended on other browsers. Firefox has been my default for decades, but I can’t get by without Chrome for many sites.
@koalie I reposted a toot not so long ago about how these "web developers" should not be allowed to call themselves web developers, as they are actually Google Chrome developers.
Normal Firefox, often had issues. The odd thing was none of the issues people encounter would ever be in Firefox Nightly. I have been using Nightly for over a decade and have found it to be the better browser.
It is odd. It should not be. Nightly is their Alpha software. It should be filled with issues. But I have found Nightly to be more stable, faster, more responsive, and better at page rendering than any browser, including regular Firefox.
@fredbrooker@bladecoder You're technically working with one browser. It's all chromium based.
I use Mozilla Firefox Nightly and occasionally I play with the Vivaldi browser. If something were to ever happen to Firefox, I guess that would be my plan "B".
But I'm actually working with two browsers. You're working with one, rebranded. 😉
@bladecoder I've kinda fallen into Edge but I have to ask, how's the battery on Firefox now? I've noticed that Edge was significantly better on my system a couple months ago
@jaiden I didn't do battery life comparisons but I suppose it depends on which OS you're using. In any case, Firefox supports GPU acceleration for a lot of things including video decoding.
@bladecoder the only reason I’m still using Edge is because I have come to rely on vertical tabs and grouping, and I would like to see Firefox implement that out-of-the-box as well.
Always use open source when available. I´ve been there since Mozilla and Netscape 1.0 (on UNIX) and it's evolving variations have been serving me fine till now.
@bladecoder I suspect the issue is that it doesn't handle low memory. I have a cheap phone and keep tabs open. It is terrible in FF but works well with Brave, so the issue is with FF.
@bladecoder I understood Chrome to only be restricting new ad blockers, by dint of enforcing a strict content security policy which does also stop extension authors from placing tracking scripts into the little pop-up that appears when you click an extension’s icon.
@DigitalStefan Manifest v3 limits the number of URLs to block and prevents dynamic content filtering (which can be used for good or bad) by removing an API that many ad blockers currently use.
@bladecoder I had a poke around at what’s involved in authoring an extension because I noticed one that implemented the Google Tag Manager script in its little pop-up UI.
It was a manifest V2 extension, which are still allowed on the store, but you can’t get a new extension added to the store unless it’s V3.
The main difference I saw was the implementation of a strict content security policy, essentially removing the ability to grab remote data.
@bladecoder I tried authoring a V3 that implemented the same GTM script and it was not possible to trick the CSP to allow it to work.
My all time favourite extension is V2 and if Google make good on their threat to remove all V2’s from availability next year, I’m going to be really annoyed because I suspect the author may not update it.
@bladecoder you can argue that Firefox doesn't enable a lot of things by default that are enabled in Chrome (for better or for worse) and for those settings that you'd want to enable you don't really have a convenient way that's not about:config
I'm not sure if FF is faster, it's still kinda catching up to Chrome (the memory consumption and privacy are good enough justifications to use it over Chrome though).
@a13cui By curiosity, is there something disabled by default that you're missing in Firefox?
Of course speed is subjective and benchmarks are biased. Before, everybody agreed that Chrome was faster. Today, at least the latest WebXPRT benchmarks are putting Firefox ahead of Chrome. In real life, they are both just as fast and there is no good reason to stick with Chrome. The Firefox team did a great job at optimizing the latest versions.
@bladecoder I know they're on par, I've used (and still use) FF for 12 years now so I remember how it used to be.
Well, PWAs on desktop is a huge one (it might be one of the reasons why you can't use Teams for the poor souls who need it on Linux, besides probable Chromium-only things) and I know it's possible to have it because it exists in the Android browser. I also routinely enable HW acceleration via VA-API which is still not on by default. I sort of miss the Web Codecs API which does what it says on the tin, although it's not THAT big of a deal. It's really debatable if I do need Web Share and Clipboard APIs and if they should even exist, but oh well.
@veronica what OS do you use, by any chance? Since on Linux they essentially said "use Chrome/Edge + PWA, that's The Only Supported™️ Way (and teams-for-linux isn't doing justice)
@veronica@a13cui I can confirm that (ArchLinux here) MS Team can be used with FF, group video calls works too!
You can not initiate a 1 to 1 call tho.
Not sure if it is the same underlying issues that is forcing Slack to block their Hurdle "group-call" feature just for Firefox
"In almost every style calculation benchmark [...] Firefox smokes every other browser engine to the point where it’s really in a class of its own. [...]other browsers may take over 1,000ms in a given scenario, Firefox will take ~100ms for the same scenario on the same hardware."
@Malaoshi1904@janriemer@nolan@bladecoder Brave is as good for your privacy as Google Chrome, in fact worse with their crypto shit. Who the hell thinks that an ad company is gonna protect your data? Oh wow, you sure are raging against the Google monopoly by using a Chromium reskin, what can I say
@pl@nitrofurano@bladecoder that on desktop, and on Android, if you have F-Droid, use Fennec (fork with a little amount of patches, fast-tracking to upstream)
@selfisekai@pl@nitrofurano@bladecoder Fennec F-Droid also has arbitrary extension support in a stable release! (Standard Android Firefox only allows extensions from a supported list by Mozilla in stable, and arbitrary extensions in Beta.)
You have to do a weird thing called a Custom Collection to make extensions available to it then, but it'll support 95% of Firefox extensions then. (Some will have UI weirdness on phone.)
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