Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!
And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.
Well… there is a reason why so many folks sswitched to Chrome. Especially back when Chrome was new, Firefox just felt sluggish and slow. Chrome was a new breeze.
It took Firefox a long time to catch up. I’ve been trying semi regularly and just 3 years ago it was “okayish”. Tried it a few days ago again and switched all my devices over.
I don’t know what happened, but I installed it and it just felt snappy and fast. Apart from having some awesome features. Luckily if you don’t really keep bookmarks and such, switching isn’t that hard.
Depends on what you mean by “when”. From my POV for the last few years, it has an amazing plugin ecosystem (almost complete interoperability with Chrome’s), a revamped/minimal UI, performance optimizations, a better DX for web devs than Chrome, and an active R&D (Firefox View, new plugins button, better personalization, etc). I’m missing a few things but those are the ones that stand out to me.
I’m switching today. Right now. Because of this post.
^^maybe EDIT: okay. I think I’ve done it. I’m currently editing this comment from Firefox. I already had Firefox installed. But now I have pinned it to my taskbar. I went to import my bookmarks from chrome, and found that I also had the option of importing other stuff from chrome, too (bookmarks, passwords, history and autofill data). That’s sweet. My bookmark bar has the same bookmarks in the same position. I also installed ublock origin, like someone recommended. And I am going to give it a go. If it all goes smoothly, I will unpin Chrome from the taskbar.
I highly recommend putting your passwords in a paid manager. Bitwarden is awesome. I’m also testing out Protonpass which just came out. If you’re looking to move more services from google to an alternative, give Proton a look. Been running their email, calendar, and VPN and I’ve been pleased. Its still missing a few things but its improving everyday.
If it would help with the transition, Firefox has a first time install option to move over all of your bookmarks. A super cool reason to have a firefox account is the ability to transfer a tab from one device to another. Best part is that Firefox isn’t profit motivated like Chrome so there’s much less bullshit to deal with
fantastic. Also, just so you don’t have all that “YoU hAvE tHrEe ViDeOs LeFt” BS copy paste this to the “my filters” tab (go to about:addons, click on uBlock, there dots, “preferences”, then “my filters”) and you should be good to go:
And I’m just gonna drop this right here for those who use Twitch
For the first step: Click the Extensions button (puzzle piece icon) on the right side of the toolbar next to the main hamburger menu > right-click uBlock Origin from the drop-down > “Manage extension”
IMHO we have several really big problems with the web as it is today, which are intertwined:
The web (standards) is by far too complicated. If even Microsoft doesn’t have (or isn’t willing) to provide the resources to implement a browser, there are not many players left with the resources and the motivation
Google Chrome and Safari are the only game in town. (My main browser is Firefox, but seriously, we have such a small market share that nobody gives a damn)
Most people/governments/companies don’t care or don’t understand the problem of the mono culture for browsers
The value of the web is everything which is already on the web and that one can access anything with the browser - for this reason, we can only grow in the direction of more complicated while keeping backwards compatibility
Besides lip-service to the contrary, our politicians want to control communication and supervise their citizens, so for politicians it is better to have a browser controlled by a company like Google, than a really free web
Given how fundamental important the web is for modern human basic infrastructure, we (as a society) should find a better way to protect our infrastructure, freedom of speech and basic freedoms.
Besides lip-service to the contrary, our politicians want to control communication and supervise their citizens, so for politicians it is better to have a browser controlled by a company like Google, than a really free web
I got downvoted to hell for being against a centralized authority in other threads. Good to see I’m not the only “paranoid and crazy” one.
Thank you for posting this. I’ve read five or six descriptions of the issues with Google’s proposal by now and this was the first one that was clear, concise, and not riddled with histrionics.
Google already rolled out AMP which is overtly hostile to an open internet and faced zero repercussions from it. The same will be true for this. The average person has no idea what this means, doesn’t care, and won’t be bothered by it. Politicians always side with big business.
The most valuable sites are already advertisement free. Anyone remaining who implements this standard just reduces their viewers. People will do without or other sites will offer an alternative. The tech is doomed to fail because the consumer is always right.
Average users view the web raw, this will go totally unnoticed by >90% of users. If web-drm becomes a thing then it will be easy enough to block those sites and add them to the list of media that is morally acceptable to pirate.
Is there any reason Firefox or anyone else can’t just draw blank elements over the ads to block them on a separate layer? That way the site still thinks ads are being displayed. Kind of like the browser internal version of cutting out sticky notes and pasting them over your screen to cover the ads.
Time to fly the Jolly Roger and find ways to get entire websites, not just movies and TV shows, off the high seas and past the blockade. Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
That’s not true at all as far as EU tech company regulations are concerned. Examples: laws for GDPR, right to repair, consolidated charging ports, minimum size & pricing roof on roaming data - and related fines for disobeying them.
Same goes for local authorities. Munich even had its own Linux distro, then M$ opened a big office in the city and suddenly whole FOSS project was abandoned and everything runs on Windows.
Noone had issues, everything was fine. Everyone was against using Windows in the parlament vote. The president or smth who was part of Microsoft had the full decision and just went with it. Fucking creepy. Humanity was a mistake.
What I find funny is that Ben or one of his few colleagues that helped write the draft closed the Github page over the weekend because of pressure and promises to open it back on monday or something.
This has already happened in the past, and it will unfortunately end exactly like it did before.
It’s going to end up exactly like it did with WC3 EME, as mentioned in the 2014 article mentioned few comments after the one you linked. This quote from the article sums it up perfecly:
I know of people recommending Chrome (not Chromium) because it has Flash Player natively incorporated, so you no longer have to install it separately.
This serves to prove that the majority of users doesn’t know about either the technical or ethical differences in the software they are using.You may also think of the pirated software the are using,but this is a different matter. Ignoring this marketshare goes against Mozilla’s idea of a web available to everyone, not to mention that Firefox is no longer the most used browser as it used to be a a few years ago and it is therefore forced to comply with this kind of requests.
As a Linux user this has got me very worried. Chromium has so much market share that this change will certainly go through, and I feel like Safari won’t care as it benefits them and their ecosystem to have device checks. I feel like Firefox and non standard OSes will almost certainly be blocked on a large range of websites with little impact on total users, not to mention completely blocking ad block and anti-tracking clients.
I think eventually regulators in the US will file an antitrust lawsuit and break chromium off of Google if this actually happens, but until then Fediverse/FOSS and personal websites are going to be the only places untouched by this.
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