- Browser diversity weakens Google's grip on web development, and their position as a gatekeeper of the web.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Should be #1, tbh.
Are there any practical options outside of chromium apps and Firefox forks?
I hate to say it but they're preaching to the choir, as we say. The people who need to switch won't read this great article.
I’m pretty sure the number of Lemmy users who like Chrone is very small. It feels like most people here already use Firefox or some related browser.
Well, you don't need to switch. But, you can help your friends and family switch by setting up Firefox with Ublock-Origin.
If they see the benefits. They will stick
- It's literally the only other decent option that is not a fork of the it or it's one competitor.
Unfortunately, both are funded by google. Yes, officially it's just payments to keep the home page in firefox set to Google. But... without that Mozilla would collapse. Google's got them by the low level components.
what i want to understand beyond just "did you know chrome bad" is why laymen are so insistent on it.
so we can break it.
Because my bank only works on chromium. Please break it
oh fuck, this one always hurt. simulating chrome through a user agent swap works?
what stops you from using firefox for everything else?
No. Its the fingerprinting that breaks.
(primarily firefox user here) the Google account being able to be used as a universal login is sorta convenient (at the expense of privacy) Snapchat web (at least previously) requiring it to work (or at least it's user agent) and an all in all slightly cleaner (more samey) experience.
i mean if you login with google on any google site on firefox, it will also log you in to everything....
and being cleaner is a matter of habit tbh, they look very similar
I guess I just assumed everyone was using Firefox, except the business side of things, but then this isn’t my area. Why wouldn’t you use Firefox at home?
Look at the real statistics. Everyone is using Chrome. Even among developers.
We are outliers. On Linux devices I use FF derivatives (Floorp, LibreWolf), and on macOS I’m using Orion RC.
I occasionally have to use Chrome because sometimes the sites I need to use won't work with Firefox. This includes bill pay for some of my utilities. (At least usually by the next month, the utility company fixes their site again so I can use Firefox...)
I can name a couple other reasons why FF is better:
- I get way more lower-level control via
about:configover internals than chrome'sabout:flags(i.e., adjust caches, buffers, networking strategies, GC thresholds, etc.) - I can fully disable newer ad delivery mechanisms like Service Workers and WASM at a core level (NOTE: while these were initially touted as ways to speed up the internet, they unfortunately are used mostly as ad-blocking and tracking circumvention measures now; its also easy enough to re-enable them temporarily if a site uses one for legitimate reasons).
- Actual, no-kidding, site cannot override, auto-play blocking (via some
about:configtweaks).
With the newer FF versions they landed some very nice speedups, but with some of the tweaks i've made, basically FF be zoom'n now 😅
The privacy bit is just as much absent as using chrome. You'd want a fork for either of the two for that.
Sorry but your argument is absolutely false. Even if Firefox is not the most private browser ever, it's waaaay more private than Chrome. And you can even make it better with a couple of toggles.
It definitely used to be different. But since the eu's "cookie laws" as they're called, google and mozilla worked together on a new approach.
What do you mean?
Forget Chrome and use Edge. It's honestly the best chromium browser now.
Ah yes, let me add some Microsoft spyware to my Google spyware
Exactly! Seems like a very "Yo Dawg!"-moment to me.
The less Microsoft I need, the better, and recently switched from VS Code to VS Codium, which, I believe, puts me at 100% free of Microsoft 😍
(Barring some M$ code in other software I use that I don't know about)
1 reason I wont' use Firefox or any gecko-based fork and I'll keep using a Chromium fork, instead: I don't want to support Mozilla.
Enough.
But supporting Google is fine? Because if using any gecko fork is supporting Mozilla, then using any chrome fork is supporting Google.
How is it different? Or how is Mozilla worse than Google?Or are you using safari or other webkit based browsers?
But you support Google? xD
That is like cutting off your own nose to spite your enemies.
Damn pesky nose stealers! That'll show 'em!
Why not?
I use Firefox everywhere but lately I've been also using Vanadium on GrapheneOS.
This article is crap. There are so many reasons to choose Chrome from a UX perspective. Firefox is only superior to Chrome from an ideological perspective.