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by jnsaff2 1390 days ago
Firefox is not that bad. Honestly the multi-account containers alone merits the switch.
3 comments

I don't get where "not that bad" is coming from with Firefox these days. Firefox is just plain good, and has been for a while.
I don't trust Mozilla. They continually make changes against the interests of the computer literate, they continually screw with the UI, they continually take control away from the user, they are literally in Google's pocket, and their own attempts at fundraising put the lie to their claims about privacy.
I don't understand this reasoning. On one hand everyone complained that Firefox was to slow to bloated could be brought down by extensions etc. and moved to chrome because it was faster. Then Firefox implemented changes to make it faster, isolate extensions etc. and everyone complains that they killed them off and doesn't think of the users. Now we have the situation that people say they can trust Mozilla, because of these changes, while at the same time they stay on chrome.

I have two issues with this, 1. Chrome is so much worse in respecting its users, it is completely hypocritical to say not to trust Firefox but use chrome. 2. All these posts are actually painting the impression that there is no valid alternative, in fact that chrome is the less bad (freer) choice compared to chrome. This creates exactly the narrative that Google wants, that their choices are really just minor inconveniences and there is no valid alternative to chrome. I mean just in this thread we have seen many posts that state that Mozilla is essentially doing the same just slower and cant be trusted, despite statements and actions to the contrary.

Chrome is not to be trusted; this I agree with. Chromium forks on the other hand, like brave or vivaldi, have none of these problems. The former has already committed to not implementing this garbage restriction on blockers. Chromium's engine is solid from a technical standpoint and doesn't have any inherent privacy issues aside from being owned by Google engineers.

If it sounds like I'm holding Firefox to a higher standard, I am. Their own positioning in their own marketing is based on a moral stance on privacy and "empowering the user". They have demonstrated that this stance is held out of marketing convenience rather than sincerity.

Chrome is the devil you know, you know it is made by an ad company, is filled with tracking, and will always act to support that. Firefox is… Not who they make themselves out to be. That's almost worse in a way.

You think a crypto company and a closed-source browser have your best interests at heart?

You do you.

They have demonstrated through their actions a lot more of a commitment to my best interest then Mozilla has over the last decade or so. Actions are a lot more important than licenses.
Brave has an ad blocker built in. Whatever its flaws, it deserves at least some respect for that alone. Built in ad blocking should be a standard feature of every browser.
I think Firefox is an important alternative to WebKit/Blink-based browsers.

But as a web developer I semi-regularly butt up against bugs in it that have languished in Bugzilla since like, 2014, with absolutely no progress on them.

I have dealt with two (maybe three?) bugs in Chrome ever and one of them was a pretty clear fuckup they rolled back within days.

I've dealt with many nasty rendering bugs in chromium that were never addressed, from weirdness that just made rendering a bit ugly, to spec-incompliant layout (that also differed from other engines), to iframe-related stuff that left half of the frame completely white, to animation/transition related gotchas, to outright renderer crashes, including some that brought down the chromium wrapper process (which may have been security risks, but figuring that out isn't easy). And ditto for firefox. This is years ago by now, but my impression isn't that chromium doesn't have bugs nor that it fixes bugs promptly, but rather that all websites and web-toolkits necessarily are designed with chromium limitations in mind. That's certainly what I did - no point in releasing anything that doesn't work on chromium; that'll just get you laughed at and ignored.

The chromium bugtracker too is full of ancient unresolved bugs, just like gecko's bugzilla: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?sort=id, and I'm sure that if you wanted to you could find a ton of decade old bugs that leave you wondering how those weren't fixed by now.

This just seems to be a fact of life with various browser engines. There are surely all kinds of more or less reasonable motivations to ignore those old bugs, but whatever the cause it's certainly the status quo.

I've only got a very tiny and rudimentary homepage, but when I finally got around to adding some basic stylesheet to it, I almost immediately managed to run into an issue with Chrome(ium)/Blink.

I also managed to find another case where of all things Internet Explorer (!) was the only one (possibly EdgeHTML, too, but I don't remember that any more and now it's been replaced by Blink-based Edge, I can't easily check it, either) that got things right.

From my experience, almost every website doesn't feel as nice in Firefox as it does in Chrome. Ofcourse some of those sites are maintained by Google (YouTube).
And some things don't even work. For instance, my dentist had a sign "rate us here on google" with a QR code. That code didn't work on my phone. I eventually figured out that it works fine in Chrome, but doesn't work in Firefox. In fact, there's no way to rate businesses on Google.com from Firefox on my phone. The links just aren't there, and going directly gives a 404.

Everything works fine on Chrome.

That's obviously done maliciously by Google, of course.

Chrome/chromium based, is worse than IE in this regard - because of Google specifically, we've moved from "viewed best in" to "only works in".
It's excellent! I've been using it for three years now with zero problem.
I agree, this is a really useful feature.