Silly me, did I just say "me"? That'll be me and my customers (probably not enough to make much of a dent in the stats but rather more than a few users)
I've been a double user of Chrome and Firefox for the last several months. Firefox irks me in some ways still but I've gradually grown accustomed to it. It's also much more customizable.
Indeed, if Chrome breaks uBlock Origin and uMatrix, I am just ditching it and will only use it for testing.
Same for me. There is no real reason that I use Chrome rather than any other browser. I switched to it like 10 years ago for whatever reason and I had no reason to switch away from it since then.
I use Firefox on mobile, despite all the issues I encounter with it, because its the only browser that allows me to use uBlock origin. I will no doubt switch for that reason to Firefox on Desktop too.
Those are hollow threats. If you really care, you all really ought to stop using Chrome now, regardless of whether they go through with this. Bitching on forums aren’t going to register on their metrics. Only actually stopping use will.
And that message is "Oh well, it would cost too much to revert that feature. We'll just shove some more ads into the search product telling people to 'upgrade' to Chrome."
Yep, made the switch to Firefox with DuckDuckGo little less than a year ago. It was surprisingly fast to get used to and I haven't been more at ease since. I highly recommend trying this out for at least 1 week for everyone out here!
With the news that Edge would switch to chromium, Firefox is really the only thing preventing a complete web browser monoculture. Support Firefox if you can!
Safari will survive since Apple is their patron. Obviously Internet Explorer is only a lumbering undead husk at this point, and it's pretty shameful that it's still outgunning Firefox by a small amount. Even more sad that it's got over twice as many users as Edge, lol.
These numbers do not appear to include mobile browsers. Mobile browsers are just as important as desktop browsers these days, because a lot of people use them as much or more than they use desktop browsers.
If you include mobile browsers, Safari's market share is closer to 17%, which makes it the #2 most popular:
I work for a website with around 1.2 billion annual pageviews. Mobile Safari is about 55%, Chrome (mobile & desktop) 35% and everything else gets the leftovers. Samsung browser is growing fast while IE, Edge, macOS Safari and Firefox are rounding errors.
Kindle browser does better than IE. It’s amazing how far and hard it's fallen.
Yes, they have to comply with NSLs. Difference though is the level of data they harvest on you. Google's business model requires they harvest as much as possible and in a way they ensure they can read it. Further, the bigger risk to most users is not NSL's, it's having some dodgy ad-corp buy your data and sell it to even dodgier companies.
And banks and insurances for credit ratings. And for screening companies, that are contracted to evaluate your job application on basis of your purchases, locations and so on
I use Safari as my preferred browser and I'm really happy with it, it's become a lot faster with each update, noticeably so. But I don't trust Apple any more than I trust Google to fight for a free Internet. We need an open browser.
Thanks for the reminder. I try to give a little to Mozilla and Wikipedia on a regular basis. So far they are living proof that there is a way to make this whole mess work at a high standard of quality without resorting to the advertising model, which seems to become more heinous by the day.
Please everyone help the other options survive, even if you don't personally like them or use them. There is no way legislators are ever going to catch up on their technical knowledge enough to manage even the most blatant monopoly. Who am I kidding, they wouldn't care anyway. Somebody has to get in there to offer competition and keep things honest. Having options improves all of the options.
This is an excellent point. There is absolutely no way a browser which loads and executes ad-loading and tracking script can be possibly be faster than one that doesn't.
Yeah, even with all the speed increases from the rewrite, Firefox still feels awkward and slow at times when compared to Safari and Chrome. Every time I decide to try and switch over from Safari, I get pages where scroll performance is a lot slower than what I'm used to and then I get bothered by it and switch back.
It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
Note that the WebRender can only be enabled in the Firefox Nightly channel. To confirm that it's working, flip the pref, restart Firefox Nightly, and then search for "WebRender" in about:support.
WebRender does work on macOS (and Android and maybe Linux), but Mozilla is prioritizing a Windows MVP first (because something like 90% of Firefox users are on Windows). Work on macOS, Linux, and Android will then resume.
> I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
Yet how long will we have it if everyone keeps using excuses to continue using Chrome?
I use Chromium on linux because Firefox doesn't have touch-screen support and smooth-scrolling feels a little rough. I wont hesitate to switch over if these changes are made though.
I find the touchscreen support to be pretty good with Fedora's patches running on Wayland. I think these patches are slated for upstreaming, so get excited!
Disclaimer: I contribute to Firefox and enjoy it quite a bit.
+100 This is the first setting I change on a new Linux laptop install.
You can also disable smooth scrolling only for the touchpad in about:config to keep the animation for scrolling with the keyboard. Search for "smooth"; I think it's the mouseWheel one, but I'm not at home to verify.
I've always wondered how Chrome and Firefox password storage fare in safety. Are they both equality trustworthy? Are the encryption technologies comparable?
Firefox has this in nightly too (possibly only in US). It's been there a while and works well, I don't know why it hasn't moved on from nightly, to be honest...
I've been using 1Password for years now, and it has extensions for both browsers. Now I'm portable and not locked into a single browser. I had a friend nag me for a long time because I was too lazy to try it out. Once I did, I have never regretted it.
Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
They do have some parts that are Firefox-exclusive. This is an easy advantage to have over your competition practically for free. I hope they see that.
Firefox does not stack tabs like Chrome does and does not load all the restored session tabs at once either. Aren't these dumb design decisions enough to switch to a product where people actually think about how it's going to be used?
Laying all the trans at one cripples my core i8 system for some time. Firefox's lazy tab loading is a much better user experience. Together with TreeStyle Tabs and the recent multi-container add-on, Firefox is just a better experience.
I used to be a fanatic about tree style tabs, but due to the new api, it's unusable with containers. I recently switched over to vertical tabs for that reason. I miss the tree layout, but at least now my tabs maintain their ordering.
I'm sure you're aware that not every user will have the same experience with a piece of software. There are a couple of bugs referenced in the Github issues for TST relevant to containers. There is a workaround, but I experience the issue again within a half hour. Not worth it to me.
Alright, it's just that the phrasing - blaming it on the new API - made it sound like an inherent flaw that would affect everyone, which definitely isn't right.
also, if you use Autodiscard plugin, you will find that FF use less RAM and Ru. more faster. Essentially discard and suspend tabs that you aren't using.
Plus Chrome just works better for a lot of sites. That might be because the site isn't properly coded, but users don't care. They just want something that works and more often than not, that's Chrome.
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
I was doing some work with very large data sets in Google Sheets last week. I started hitting row and cell limits. Personally, I think a database is more appropriate for what I was doing, but spreadsheets are more grokable by non-techies.
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
> Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
It's a pretty standard Firefox installation (I also tried disabling uBlock and resetting my privacy settings), and I just confirmed the user agent looks normal, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0. I think it broke when I moved last week from one EU country to another. Why that would make a difference, I don't know, but Adidas is now serving me WEBP images in Firefox 64 regardless of my browser settings, whether I clear cookies, use a private window, or choose different regional versions of the website.
So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.
Is that really relevant? I'd be happy if you could point me to a more capable tool. Zoho and Excel Online have never really made it onto my radar, but if they perform better in this situation I'd check them out. A lot of people are tied to the constraints they have.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
I was working on my taxes last weekend and I hit a bunch of them. ADP, the 401K and FSA provider sites, Aetna, and a 529 saving plan site are all ones I can think of off the top of my head.
In a couple of projects I'm currently working on, the CSS for them was causing me problems between the 2 browsers. Willing to admit that I don't have an intimate familiarity with CSS best practices. I look up what I think I'm trying to do, and then implement what I've found. I primarily use Firefox while I'm coding, and then only check with Chrome and Safari periodically. I've had to circle back to fix CSS issues specifically for WebKit not rendering as expected. Eventually, I can get to something that works across all the browsers I have access (no Android devices anywhere).
It's the same for Gmail, but this isn't Firefox at fault. It's Google doing this on purpose by using the old, experimental, non-standard ShadowDOM V0 API, which only Chrome supports, and then using that across its products to break non-Chrome based browsers. Please don't reward them by using Chrome just because of this. That only shows them that such abusive behavior works.
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing that information. I never did use Chrome other than testing it out for less than a day, finding issues with various sites and uninstalling it. Firefox instead since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left. Never had a real problem with it.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
Enough people use Gmail and YouTube that maybe it would make sense for Firefox to add support for ShadowDOM V0 API? It might not be a W3C standard, but if Google uses it heavily then it's a defacto standard.
They could, except that would effectively show Google that it can dictate what other browsers implement, alter its products on rapid basis to regularly break them etc. and at that point there's almost no point to an alternative, since we'd we're fully back in the IE era again, which is why I don't think it's a good idea.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
Firefox doesn't have the market share to push back on Google. The best way for Firefox to grow is to make the best browser from the user's perspective.
I get that, but this seems like controlled opposition.
Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.
Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.
Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.
If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.
> IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of my experience. I browse solely on Firefox and don't encounter sites which only work on Chrome at all (at least as far as I can remember right now). I wonder what's different between our browsing habits that's causing this.
A major problem is also that google websites run like crap in firefox. Gmail takes 20 seconds to load and don't get me started on youtube studio. Even the "feedback" button is broken in firefox so I can't even report the bugs I find.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
> While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
They're a nice feature, although after a long while of trying, I ended up using just the Facebook container. The main container extension felt like too much work in regular browsing, and the tracking protection seems otherwise adequate when combined with uBlock.
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
That's because you weren't properly setup with containers. I have 4 sessions going on right now, without any manual intervention. Facebook, work, Google and default. All interacting as intended with their assigned domains as isolated sessions.
The Temporary Containers was a nice add-on built on top of that.[0] While it's a pain in the aspect of cookie-use across domains (like logging into Azure), it's other features out-weigh the initial nuissance - like automatic deletion of the container, as soon as the last one for that particular domain is closed. All of this is, of course, configurable.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
The dev console is better than Firefox one. It's faster. Minimalistic interface is great. HOWEVER - Firefox console is catching up. Firefox is fast enough. Chrome is getting more and more bloated and interface is starting to suck compared to initial version of Chrome. Now they're trying to do stupid things and promote ads more and more. It gets worse every day and hopefully, they'll screw up to the point it dies. I loved Google before, now I'm disliking them as much as I do Facebook. I root for Firefox, but it's still not there yet.
Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.
I'm invested in the Google ecosystem, and have recently got myself a Pixel Slate that I carry everywhere as my primary computing/ media device (no more separate laptop and tablet). It would now be silly of me to use Firefox in place of Chrome. Moreover I have got nothing to hide, so all these privacy-fears don't concern me; in fact I often feel like they are being overblown.
Don't mean to insult you, and some people just have an easier time opening up about everything, but a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
> a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Ever familiar with the phrase "un unexamined life is not worth living"? Here, of course, the thing to be examined is your belief that a life with nothing whatsover to hide is limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Chrome is deeply integrated in ChromeOS devices (should be obvious from the naming), of which the Pixel Slate is what I own. A bunch of PWAs (arguably the future of android apps) also require Chrome.
Moreover I use Chrome to sync my Google account, including passwords (which I can't live without) and browsing history.
People who feel that they have “nothing to hide” don’t quite understand the extent to which they’re being mined for personal data. Google offers all of this amazingly polished software for free so naive people like you will feed them your browsing history, email, location and search queries. They will then monetize that data by targeting ads to you, which generates over 80% of their revenue.
If you are ok with that and still think you have nothing to hide, ask yourself if you’d be ok with this trove of data ever being exposed publicly.
Ever googled something embarrassing? Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
Sent a very personal email?
Visited a less than savory location, or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
> ask yourself if you’d be ok with [your browsing history, email, location and search queries] ever being exposed publicly.
I already did, and the answer was "Yes, I'd be okay" (although the likelihood of that happening is extremely rare).
> Ever googled something embarrassing?
Use incognito mode.
> Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
I have only one medical condition, which I'm not embarassed to talk about publicly (I already do it).
> Sent a very personal email?
I rarely send "very personal"/ intimate information over email in lieu of just talking over phone.
> Visited a less than savory location,
Never in my life.
> or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I never had to do it (why would I?).
> I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
If--note "if"--I were to engage in an activity that could potentially be used to blackmail or harm me in any way, I would of course be doing it in as private manner as possible. However it would be silly to spend the rest of my normal life cowering and being phobic to technological advances.
> Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
You confuse being naive (in its original sense of the word) with being ignorant. But I guess that's what fear does to one.
This is a flawed study by a Google's competitor (the for-profit organization called DuckDuckGo). FTA:
> Following the study’s publication this morning, Google told The Verge in a statement that it found the methodology flawed and the findings misleading. “This study’s methodology and conclusions are flawed since they are based on the assumption that any difference in search results are based on personalization. That is simply not true,” a Google spokesperson said. “In fact, there are a number of factors that can lead to slight differences, including time and location, which this study doesn’t appear to have controlled for effectively.”
Yes, they are likely tracking users in incognito mode. You're still loading google analytics or doubleclick resources on many, many sites. Merely making that request (or any request to a google property) gives them your IP which is static enough to identify a household or corporate complex based on previously gathered data. From there these javascript libs phone home every bit of data they can from your browser, including UA string/browser minor version, plugins, resolution (fingerprinting). This can further narrow things down to an individual device you have used before, especially if you're just popping in and out of incognito.
Google also operates some of the most popular DNS services 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 which can capture domains you query from your IP.
There are various measures you can go through to stop this to some degree, like DNS blocking, client-side ad/tracker blocking, VPNs etc. but to go all-out is very cumbersome and I'm not convinced that it would even be 100% effective. Google's business DEPENDS on collecting your data and tracking you, and they are very, very good at it. I highly recommend reading "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism".
It is a shame that you are being downvoted. I (like a lot of people here) disagree with you, but you have a point of view shared by a lot of people. It's an important point of view to consider and engage with because my impression is that it's the majority view from the population - based on their actions, they don't care about their data privacy if it gets them gmail for free.
For a lot of people they possibly hold that view due to a lack of understanding about the situation, but some people like you understand the situation and still are OK with it. That's an entirely reasonable point of view which should be eagerly debated with.
> It is a shame that you are being downvoted. I (like a lot of people here) disagree with you, but you have a point of view shared by a lot of people.
People are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest. I recall reading a forum, where a guy asked for medical advice, because he was diagnosed with fibrosis (his lungs basically got scarred all over). His work required him to continuously inhale toxic exhaust, and he wanted a way to avoid further health complications (but keep a work!) because "the pay was good".
Fibrosis causes you to cough non-stop and significantly increases probability of dying from lung infection. Compared to that, using Google's products does not result in any visible long-term effects on health. Therefore, it is natural to conclude, that using Google's sites and services is safe, healthy and should be widely encouraged. It does not matter, that Google uses anti-competitive practices to monopolize market, restrict user freedom and lead us to future, when we won't be able to refuse shoehorned "services", shoved in our face, right?
Please stop with those creepy "understanding" antics. Encouraging self-harm is bad, and wishing to view advertisements is definitely a form of self-harm.
You are essentially deciding for me that what I choose to do with my technological choices is "a form of self-harm" (when in fact I only experience total pleasure).
Is it really that hard to comprehend that, when one does not share the alarmist feelings of the crowd, they will make intelligent choices based on personal preferences?
I did a factory reset on my Android phone today and was depressed when I realized the vast number of settings I have to change in order to get even a small semblance of privacy. App permissions, location history, disabling of default apps; the list goes on.
What about his address, and his family and friends' addresses, as well? What about his income, where he works, the time he leaves for work and the time that he gets back? And the street he grew up on and his mother's maiden name?
I'm sure you believe that's true, but I suggest that your belief is based on a certain confidence that the people pouring through your data are fundamentally acting in good, or at worse neutral faith.
However, if this data ever gets into the hands of someone acting in bad faith, even the most innocent behaviour can be weaponized against you. Let's say, for example, that you are wrongly suspected of committing a crime, and the investigating police are more interested in cooking up a conviction than determining if you actually did it.
All sorts of details about your life can be leaked and "spun" to make you look very, very bad. You went to a bar on a certain evening? So did these known crime figures. Were you meeting them?
You spend time on Hacker News. HACKER NEWS. You could find yourself the target of a smear campaign designed to turn public sentiment against you.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."—Cardinal Richelieu
If you hand over your data without hesitation to a nation-state or to powerful and unscrupulous corporations, I believe you will discover that there is no such thing as "nothing to hide."
I feel the same. I keep Chrome around, though, because it seems to be the new IE in the sense that I frequently encounter sites that simply don't work properly in either WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers. It's also the new IE in the sense that I get incessant reminders about how I should be using Chrome when I access Google-administrated services, which feels like a surprisingly blatant if still implicit admission on their part that an open web simply isn't a concern or interest of theirs. I never really believed otherwise, but still.
> I really just don't understand the obsession with Chrome, especially in hacker communities.
Chrome used to be very lightweight, fast and basically unseated IE as the top browser. It got that love because at the time Firefox was bloated and IE had a stranglehold. Chrome was also safer with a process per tab. Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile. Chrome (and Safari) or Webkit pushed HTML5/Canvas/WebGL/SVG into real world use which changed the landscape of browsers.
Nowadays Chrome is bloated like Firefox was, has a stranglehold like IE did, is now pushing its own market standards and breaking existing open/market standards and generally being a forceful, non respecting to standards, web browser. It sure is unfortunate and another sign that bizdev/marketing/executives rule over engineers at Google now.
And didn't get to this spot on any kind of technical or feature merits, but essentially by relentless nagging on the Google search page to have users install it. Sure, devs/geeks etc were eager early adopters, but the bulk of users were steered this way by Google.
> Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile.
This is the big one for me. When I'm not developing I actually prefer to use Safari-- I like it's interface better and it feels more at home in macOS. It's "good enough" too.
What I'm really a user of is the Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox's are looking quite solid lately but I just haven't switched over.
What I'd love is to have Firefox dev tools functionality in Chrome.
Firefox highlights the edge lines of the selected element automatically, and in all directions (if I recall correctly). I have to use an extension – VisBug – to achieve that in Chrome.
There's also the fonts window, which lets you in on what fonts are used on the page, and lets you modify the selected element's font settings – size, weight, slant/italic etc.. I pay a lot of attention to typography, so that part is important to me.
There's plenty to like about Firefox, like the Awesome Bar, has better bookmarking, is able to handle a huge number of tabs, has the "Multi-Account Containers" extension (with its offspring, e.g. "Facebook Container"), or the "Tree Style Tab" extension, just to name a few.
Also that it's not Chrome or based on Chromium is reason alone to like Firefox, because we need diversity for healthy web standards. That Chromium is open source is a red herring and open standards are more important.
I know developers have been preferring Chrome and for good reasons, but I've switched back to Firefox for the last 3 years and personally I find it hard to use Chrome these days, because Firefox has a better UI.
The only downside is that Chrome's dev tools still has some capabilities that Firefox lacks, but Firefox has been improving a lot, as you have seen.
1. I never asked for any of that response, nor did the situation imply that I needed to learn about the points stated to make a better decision.
2. There's a general passive-combative conversation about browsers going on ("I like Firefox, I don't get why people like Chrome" and vice versa) that I never wanted to be a part of, mostly because of how disrespectful and counterproductive it is.
3. In a thread about ad-blocking, I got what is effectively an ad for Firefox.
I don't want any of this nonsense on my side of the table. "Use my product because I value it!" No, go away, I don't need this.
My choices are rarely uninformed. I spend time considering what to pick where I'm able to. I'd like my choices to be respected as such – not have my face plastered with someone else's unprompted opinion.
Here's an example of a better conversation:
– I liked this part of Firefox, and I wish it was in Chrome too.
– Do you not like Firefox whole, then? If so, why?
– Because of X, Y, and Z. I used it intensely for a month or so, so I got a good look at the way it behaves. I know X is solvable, but not Y or Z (I tried), and they're critical to my browsing experience.
– Okay, I see. I hope you consider (browser diversity, or whatever issues using Firefox's supposed to solve), because they're important.
– Oh yeah? Can you tell me why?
...and so on. A respectful conversation that sparks curiosity and provides context, without annoying any of the parties in the process.
Otherwise, you get what you give. Seems a fair approach to me.
Nobody here is nearly as combative as you. Look up projection.
You'd like your choices to be respected, but you are incapable of offering civility. Is that also a choice we should respect, or is it beyond your control?
Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.
> Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
I got the "love", because it was (and still is) advertised on google.com. Most non-technical people readily install malware when prompted. If malware is advertised on google.com, they will install it more quickly.
Microsoft have been stalling IE development for years, which allowed Mozilla to gain huge marketshare. This resulted in a lot of people learning, how to install a third party web browser. By the time Chrome was unveiled, Mozilla have coincidentally slowed Firefox development to a crawl. I remember the point, when the stable Firefox version was close to unusable, while everyone technologically proficient used a development release. It have been so bad, that some addons simply recommended not using the stable Firefox version. Btw, things have only gotten worse since then.
Chrome's dazzling success is result of it's aggressive advertising as well as sabotage and mismanagement, that killed off alternatives.
It's still slower than other platforms but it's much faster than it used to be. I've been using Firefox exclusively on OS X / macOS for a year. The only problem I've seen is that it sometimes uses more CPU than is reasonable, which often appears to be due to Gmail's terrible implementation.
Given the claim that with Google, you (the user) are the product, your statement that, "Sorry Google, I feel 'icky & gross' when I use you", would be more accurately expressed as, "Sorry Google, I feel 'icky & gross' when I let you use me."
Chrome is still the best performing browser (even if it's a resource hog).
I tried using Firefox for Linux for about 6 months last year, but had to give up. I got frustrated with the random UI pauses/latency, random crashes, and broken web rendering (not its fault). On the other hand, Chrome just works, and provides a very smooth, low latency experience on Linux. I don't like that I have to give up my privacy for a decent browsing experience on Linux, but that's the state of things.
Yeah, it's totally anecdotal and just my experience. I would really like to use Firefox. I may try it again. Quantum made such a big improvement on Linux which is why I gave it a shot and stuck with it so long. But it still had issues for me.
Hmm...that is super strange then. Intel has definitely been the most solid for me when it comes to GPU stability, including in Firefox. I primarily use a workstation with an AMD GPU, but have a secondary laptop with Intel and had no issues with Firefox there whatsoever. I am also on Arch. The only time I ever experienced frequent crashes was when I was testing the Wayland build early on, (they still happen sometimes on Wayland, which is still experimental in Firefox, but on X things have been solid for me).
I am honestly perplexed what the issue could be then, I was sure you were using an NVidia with the proprietary drivers or something like that, as such setups have caused me trouble in the past.
The only thing is I wouldn't recommend turning on WebRender for everything yet, but it's not on by default so I doubt you had it on.
I'm currently running the experimental branch of Firefox on Linux and IMO things have improved a lot since then. I had similar issues, especially with tabs that crashes / get stuck when watching 3 or 4 twitch streams. With the latest releases almost all has gone away (cant remember any crashed tabs in the last few months).
That's really how I feel about all browsers since Opera did a U-turn and re-made their product into a Chrome clone. Firefox can get quite close with a bunch of add-ons, but not enough.
I really want to like Firefox, but it has basic bugs that make it unusable for me. E.g. waking up macOS from sleep, or switching between two active users in macOS stalls Firefox regularly and requires restarting it.
That can only do blocking at a coarse dns level. The browser extensions do a lot more. If you want to do everything at the OS layer without browser extensions, you'll have to MITM your ssl connections by trusting your CA and set up a parallel engine that does what extensions do right now.
You can block the network calls to ad networks on the OS level by intercepting the DNS requests. That's a lot cruder and less flexible than the fine grained control over the DOM provided by a browser-based ad blocker though. If DNS level ad blockers became prevalent websites would also move to circumvent them, which would be a lot easier than with browser-based ad blockers.
It's better to just not let a browser that's user hostile enough to prevent ad blocking win a browser war.
That doesn't get you close to what umatrix offers.
I can throw facebook's servers into my hosts file, but what if I want to permit connections to facebook servers if and only if I am on facebook.com? uMatrix makes that trivial.
I use FireFox full time, but I think it's inferior to Chrome. It's uglier, slower and clunkier. I use it because although I'm more than happy to hand a lot of my digital life over to Google (and I'm really not a zealot about this), the ability to observe every single web site I visit ever and every interaction I have with those sites is just a bridge too far.
Prior to 60x I would agree, but nowadays I personally prefer the look and feel of FireFox. I haven't noticed any real clunkiness outside of Google sites like Gmail either. Chrome might still be smoother, but I haven't used it in over a year now, and I don't miss it. That's the key part for me, FF works well enough that I don't feel like I'm settling.
And I completely agree with you regarding ideological reasons to use FF. You don't have to be a zealot to value your privacy.
This is fantastic, actually. It flies in the face of end users, and there will be blow back.
Power users won't stand for this sort of thing and will switch to Firefox. Firefox, in turn, will gain greater development mindshare.
In aggregate, these privacy and "ads above all" stories will continue to taint the Google brand. Many of my layperson friends are starting to worry about their privacy when using Google products--it's a good thing!
I find it rather odd that Googling "uBlock Origin" from Firefox does not return links to addons.mozilla.org - at all. The top result is of course the Chrome addon. The third result is the website for "uBlock" which is the unmaintained fork. Three pages in and you're getting dubious-looking repackaging sites, but no official addon.
>Can we finally say that DDG is better for some searches than Google?
I think we're close. For some things, it's still not the best but instead of going to <insert another search engine here>, I try to modify my query to scope to what I'm looking for.
In a crude example, if I'm looking for the "LoadCrashDump" method,, which is specific to ClrMD[0], I can simply construct my query as "ClrMD: LoadCrashDump".
I had to go to the last page and click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" to make it show up at all. After doing that it was the third result.
I worry that Mozilla will copy the API changes ("for compatibility!") and disable ublock on Firefox too, as Mozilla gets most of their funding from advertising companies too.
If the new API get's ported (which is likely to happen), it does not mean the existing API will get crippled. After all, they are different implementations and it's Mozilla who's behind that. I trust them to not deprecate the old API until all use cases, especially concerning privacy, are taken care of in the appropriate way.
I agree that ads aren't a great solution, but the entire reason Mozilla is doing things like that is to avoid having all their revenue (and thus their existence) dependent on Google. How else do you think they should make money?
The "system wide adblock" on iOS has the same restrictions as this new Chrome extension system. It does not support the extension API that uBlock Origin uses.
Not versed in the technical details but 1Blocker X for iOS Safari has prevented practically 99.9% of all ads I used to see in an unmodded Android Chrome before. I've only seen 2 websites have some form of ads in the last 14 months.
What about the UI don't you like? I've heard this complaint before, but the two appear pretty similar to me, at least to the point that I never considered one more appealing than the other.
I just opened both browsers and it's pretty hard to really see much of difference in UI. If anything, Chrome's UI is slightly more basic. But the icons, positions of menus, etc are almost identical.
I am curious, what do you not like about the Firefox UI? I honestly could go back to like Firefox 3.5 and still be fine with it. I prefer the UI of the debug tools in Firefox over Chrome as well.
That's an interesting comment considering how Chrome has recently changed its UI to look more like Firefox to the point I often mistake people for running Firefox when they are actually running Chrome.
Which is why I'm all the more disappointed that Mozilla is unable to resist the siren's call either, what with the Looking Glass decision and their tendency to deprecate UX functionality with no replacement (like custom keyboard shortcuts).
Super Metroid in 1992 had customizable keys. Mozilla gets $500 million a year and can't even keep a feature it had 3 years ago. I shouldn't be disappointed about failure to get basic things right, when they're suppose to be the great bulwark against those who wish to control your machine?
There's still a feature of Chrome that keeps me from switching - Chrome will show a lot more tabs open. I tend to leave a lot of inactive tabs to come back to later, but that means I need to see them all.
Install Tree Style Tab on Firefox. Moves tabs to a tree on the left. You can see a lot more, and better organized too. In the era of landscape screens, I think it's a must.
In Firefox I really miss the ability to tab-search from the address bar in site-specific search engines. I.e. in order to search for something on Amazon: type "amaz", tab, then type a search term. I didn't find any extensions for Firefox that would provide this feature.
That's not the correct quip (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish); and even if it were, it doesn't make any more sense in this context than your version does.
Even in the most skeptical reading of the situation, Google never "embraced" adblockers, they allowed them. You'll note there's no extensions on Chrome for Android for example.
Embrace: Google shipped its own ad blocker in Chrome last year. It blocks all ads on sites that violate ad standards set forth by the Coalition for Better Ads. If Chrome's basic ad blocker can encourage the publishers to clean up their most annoying ads, then Chrome users might be less likely to install a full-featured ad blocker like uBlock Origin.
The nice thing about the mobile version is that you can add uBlock there too. I switched to Firefox a couple years ago and haven't looked back. Also have been DuckDuckGo for about a year and last year I switched my email over to Fastmail. Funny because I used to be the biggest Google Fanboy a few years back.
Used to love google, for many many years. Slowly starting to despise them, though.
It's different for everyone, but for me it started with this gmail redesign that made the product so slow it's almost worthless to me. And worst of all is I feel like there isn't even a good competing service to switch to.
The comments in the linked thread don't really go into why this change was made, but I think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt that the proposal was made in an effort to improve other aspects of the browser (speed or maintainability, for example)
I think for most people, their image of Google was formed when gmail was released. Most mail providers offered mailboxes 10MB in size and Google upends all of that offering "free" mailboxes 1000MB. Respect for their command of technology formed with every product.
Then people started to realize Google only introduces products that collect data in a new way from its other products. If it can't survive that test then it doesn't exist. Ugh.
I switched to protonmail a few months back, and have been very happy with the service. They focus on privacy and security as a core value. They have a limited free account (limited in terms of storage space and message volume), so not a direct replacement for gmail. I use the paid service for more storage and a custom domain.
Yes, love it. The paid service is $5/m and you can use a custom domain and create 5 email aliases. Also, I think, ProtonVPN comes with that package (not using that yet, but will)
Quad core, sixteen gigs of RAM, and it takes several seconds of "Loading" to delete an email. It's comical. If you're using Chrome you might not have the issue, Google uses a lot of proprietary Chrome only tricks to make their websites even borderline usable.
I blame the CEO. Is it a coincidence that all the best Google products peaked in 2012-2016?
They literally removed the don't be evil motto as the reason for their conduct.
People will say that they still have, but that's just a stupid line at the end. They used to have a whole preface dedicated to it and have the code of conduct based around it.
Ouch, I understand why they want to not have a blocking webRequest API but I consider uBlock Origin to be a must-have extension. Hopefully this is relaxed somehow.
I personally still use Firefox at home despite recent issues, but I honestly would prefer having both as an option, plus I always recommend uBlock Origin to everyone.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Chrome, opinions are mine and not my employer's.)
My main concern is the questionable use of Studies and other experimental paths to test things like advertising in Firefox. I don't like this. I would prefer my browser to be more neutral.
Of course I can disable it if I want. But, I wish I could simply trust my browser vendor to do the right thing.
The browser itself seems solid, I've been happy since Quantum and look forward to seeing WebRender rollout.
It's quite memory hungry. Not saying leaking per-se, but my 16GB machine at work started swapping heavily mostly due to Firefox today.
Only had about 15 active tabs (though a number of dormant ones since last FF restart). Between the various processes, FF was using about 6-7GB of memory. Closing almost all of the tabs reclaimed about 2GB, so still a lot left over.
That said I'm not too bothered, I can restart FF every other week or so.
A lot of usability issues, for example: You can't disable Ctrl-Q on Linux due to a bug that they do not seem to be willing to fix. In the past I used to depend on the "are you sure you want to close N tabs?" confirmation dialog thing but now they have removed it.
Because by moving to Chromium, Microsoft increased Google's control of the browser ecosystem by killing one of the last remaining competitors to it. Now only Firefox is left.
Before they dropped Edge, a move like this would have been a great marketing opportunity for Microsoft: "Come to Edge, where your ad blocker still works."
Google has shown some Chutzpah to sell their own ad blocker when they are the #1 advertising vendor.
If feel they have enough impunity to get away with that, then it is no surprise that they will try to put other ad blockers out of business too.
Other ad networks might be big enough to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google (although they probably won't last long enough) but Ad Blocking is such a niche market that they couldn't possibly sue.
So we have a browser with nearly 70% market share, made by an advertising company that's arguably the most powerful business on the internet, interfering with ad blocking. And of course there is no regulatory body that is able or willing to step in.
"President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, William Barr, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he would focus attention on the “huge behemoths” in Silicon Valley at the center of a debate over antitrust enforcement. "
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-barr-antitrust/...
A fish rots from the head down, and Trump's avowed preference would be to attack companies for spite if they haven't been nice to him personally. Those kind of regulations are probably not productive.
Google (and the Silicon Valley behemoths): Currently know a lot of personal information about the citizenry
The US Government: Wants to know this information
Neither are necessarily deserving of or entitled to this information, so we shouldn't be cheering for either side.
Antitrust is less the issue than personal information / privacy / data tracking regulation. Antitrust enforcement is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
Is there any reason to think the NSA doesn't have access to most of what US corporations have? Either legally through classified programs or illegally through various methods.
It's been confirmed they've had lots of forms of access many times in the past. Seems naive to believe anything would be different today.
You raise a very good point, and I can't even start to guess at the answer or implications.
I think any data the NSA has would be stringently guarded and only used for high-profile / high-impact cases. If the NSA was constantly feeding data to other agencies about trivialities, then it would raise red flags about where "all this incriminating evidence" came from.
Cases involving StingRay interceptions have been dropped so as to protect the details of such interceptions.
There's also the relationship between the agency and the Government to consider. The CIA don't seem to get along very well with various members of the US Government, and with "good" members such as Ron Wyden, if the NSA was feeding ill-gotten data to the US Govt, then someone like him would probably raise some kind of stink.
This doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether the NSA has this data, it's more about the potential mitigation of the likelihood of the data being actually used against someone.
Much like we don't know where the line is on the potential for Huawei kit to be a threat to national security.
Something. Not nothing.
Edited to add:
There's also the very likely situation where Government policy / regulation is put in place to cover all parties, and the NSA ignores this anyway because they're above the law. Everyone else must play by the rules, the US Govt looks to be doing the right thing.
(this isn't a bitter statement, merely that I think this is how things actually work, whether for the US or any other country; realpolitik)
This is just a dog whistle for the political claim that search results, curated content, or algorithmic feeds are "biased" against a particular viewpoint of the world that they would prefer. Their intent is to use enforcement and investigative powers to make that case publicly and intimidate. The worst case, in their view, is to raise uncertainty about information sources; or, in the best case, to coerce more favorable rankings for their favored information sources. It's a furtherance of our state of domestic information warfare, while they remain in power.
Why should a regulatory body step in? People were saying for years about how evil Google is, along with how limited and how much of a spyware Chrome is. There are alternatives that people can switch to, if they decide to keep using Chrome they should just suffer the consequences.
It's tempting to fall into the trap of feeling smug that you've made the right decision so no action should be taken against a company abusing their market position in a manner that's harmful to the public. Try to resist that temptation, like I have. I too have been using Firefox this entire time, but I don't let that tempt me into apathy towards the state of the industry.
You may as well question the purpose of the FDA regulating slaughterhouses since vegetarians have been found a way to avoid doing business with them. That's a nonsense position. A vegetarian should demand that the FDA regulate the meat industry, and a firefox user should demand regulation for corporations they've avoided.
Correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position, but I vaguely recall a discussion some time ago in which you compared adblocking to theft. If I'm remembering that correctly, you and I have no common ground upon which to have a civil discussion.
His primary website is still online. Me might not be allowed on YouTube anymore, but his primary platform still exists.
Additionally, I thought his removal from YouTube was as a result of pressure from the Government on hate speech and fake news etc. All the stuff Facebook is also attempting to crack down on.
Relying on Internet ads for their livelihood is a tenuous position to start with, and always has been.
The (bad actors within the) advertising industry are the enemy of people whose livelihoods depend on Internet advertising because they're the ones making ads either bandwidth-hogging, epilepsy-inducing, website-avoidingly annoying, privacy-invasive, or an actual virus/malware vector.
This is, directly, what has caused the popularity of ad blockers to skyrocket. Tech-savvy folks protecting their family from these dangers by installing ad-blocking software so they don't get regular family-tech-support calls about the various issues potentially arising from "bad" advertising.
Follow-up questions:
How many user ad clicks / views does it take for the revenue to be critical to one's livelihood?
Could you consider donations through any of the various options like Patreon?
Then you should aim regulators at the advertising industry.
Chrome has a responsibility not just to the end user but also to the website. The cost of the getting the web page's info was viewing the ads. Why should the browser help the user to commit virtual theft?
Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense. Lots of people make a living via web ads. Google makes billions on ads. It's a real source of real money. Alternatives could, and should!, be considered. But simply cutting off a revenue stream while arguing that the ability to cut off that revenue stream should be protected by regulators is weak at best.
Then you should aim regulators at the advertising industry
Yes, yes, yes, and more yes. That's the cause that needs treating. Apologies if I wasn't clear, that's definitely where I think the regulation should be looking towards.
Aaah, the Homer Simpson position: Can't win, don't try.
Regulate what's within your jurisdiction. That's all any government can do in any circumstance. If regulation results in more friendly advertising that's less likely to have users reaching for the blockers, then those advertisers are going to be more successful, and so even those in unregulated countries will need to conform in order to compete.
That's assuming that the number of users that have already reached for the blockers are of a significant enough percentage to make a difference to website ad revenue.
> Chrome has a responsibility not just to the end user but also to the website.
Chrome is the user agent. It acts purely on behalf of the user. Browsers aren't trojans built to exploit my eyeballs. This "virtual theft" talk is as silly as claiming that spam filters should be illegal - your server sent me some markup, and I'm free to preprocess it in any way I want.
> Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense.
Not really. Advertising has always been about manipulating people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't do - if all ads were purely informative it'd hardly be a multibillion dollar industry.
>abusing their market position in a manner that's harmful to the public.
Why is it abuse? No one is being forced to use chromium. Are you abusing your market position when you buy the cheapest toothbrush in a manner that's harmful to other toothbrush companies?
However, due to marketshare, the other browsers do tend to be forced to implement the same features as Chromium/Chrome.
Google can easily force the other browsers to lose the Web Request API, because maintaining it when they're the only ones using it is a net loss of productivity, which will probably be needed elsewhere.
Comparing using Chrome to eating meat is stupid. You can avoid Chrome by a 2 minute process of changing browsers. You can’t avoid the meat industry without vastly changing your dietary lifestyle and traditions.
Depending on the country, dominant market share as a search engine, online advertising platform, web browser, and operating system. And they’ve been claiming to be adding their own ad blocking to that web browser for sites that have “too many” ads. I’m not saying regulators should or shouldn’t do specific things, but one should anticipate significant anti-trust actions if Google’s lobbying influence wanes.
On the other hand, Google is getting bigger, expanding and hiring more people as the list of their failed projects increase. The chances of them screwing up their core products seems to be increasing, from my point of view. If they manage to do that, that would negate an inevitable future collision with anti-trust regulators. As for the EU and the GDPR I’m sure we are seeing the earliest warning shots and it’s going to be a big mess for them.
Because the state is responsible for the well-being of its constituents. It's the reason Australia had a Royal Commission into the banking and finance sectors - they were screwing over people who weren't well-versed in finance, people who took the word of a financial advisor (because financial advisor's are sought out by people who need help with finance) were being screwed over with loans they couldn't actually afford.
It's not possible for people to be well educated in everything and, as hard as it is to swallow for us techy types, a fair percentage of people don't have the time or inclination to even realise the potential down sides of using the Internet. They're too busy with whatever their own areas of expertise are.
Maintaining this shit is hard for a pro. The amateurs don't deserve to get shafted.
> It takes me all of 10 seconds to type duckduckgo.com, and maybe 30 to switch default search engines for the browser. [1][2]
But an equivalent, i can just download FF in 10 seconds is not acceptable in this context. why? Infact, Google browser is way less dominant that the search engine.
> I suspect a reply to your comment isn't going to change your stance on whether Google is dancing around in the anti-trust/monopoly area.
Indeed it is! We have a wonderful mechanism that handles this situation: a free market.
We've already seen far greater market share from a browser. That browser lost it's market share when it stopped serving consumers. It lost it so thoroughly that decades and billions later it still can't recoup it.
Why would you want the government to hurt Firefox and the other competitors who would be happy to compete with Google on this front?
Browser choice is most certainly a free market. Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple all develop their own, and their browsers are not beholden to the same pressures as Google (i.e. to not block ads).
You, like so many others, are conflating "ideal" market and "free" market. Free markets do not always behave ideally, and ideal markets is really what we should be aiming for.
You appear to be forgetting that a huge part of the story was government action to limit the power of the company that made that browser, both in the US and especially in the EU.
ruthless pursuit of profit risks alienation of its customers? good point though. I'd be shocked if >10% of Chrome users use uBlock Origin, in which case it's probably worth it (for their shareholders). Remember that advertisers are Google's customers, not us
I'd say at least several hundred worldwide (because many of them can simply claim jurisdiction over whatever they want that enters the lives of their citizens). There are probably about a dozen that have the teeth to actually change Google's behaviour if they chose to.
Because that's what they're for. They take actions on behalf of society, because direct action by the masses on every single issue is extraordinarily inefficient.
Not sure if they're purposefully blocking uBO. Those who are effected will either move to Firefox (and encourage their friends to), or just use another content-blocking technique (eg, DNS).
For the few extra ad clicks they'll gain, it's just not worth the upset.
Their captcha is deliberately vindictive against users who don't have google accounts, use firefox and use uBO. For instance, the tile "fade in" lasting several seconds that plays absolutely no role in making the captcha difficult for ML to solve, existing only to punish real humans who don't comply with Google's surveillance system.
So in light of that, I see no reason to not assume malice in this case too.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadIndeed, if Chrome breaks uBlock Origin and uMatrix, I am just ditching it and will only use it for testing.
WebKit?
Internet Explorer--------10.83%
Firefox-------------------9.89%
Edge---------------------4.30%
Safari--------------------3.80%
Opera--------------------1.58%
Safari will survive since Apple is their patron. Obviously Internet Explorer is only a lumbering undead husk at this point, and it's pretty shameful that it's still outgunning Firefox by a small amount. Even more sad that it's got over twice as many users as Edge, lol.
If you include mobile browsers, Safari's market share is closer to 17%, which makes it the #2 most popular:
https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
I work for a website with around 1.2 billion annual pageviews. Mobile Safari is about 55%, Chrome (mobile & desktop) 35% and everything else gets the leftovers. Samsung browser is growing fast while IE, Edge, macOS Safari and Firefox are rounding errors.
Kindle browser does better than IE. It’s amazing how far and hard it's fallen.
It's fairly likely that's just PR. They're a US headquartered place, so would have to comply with NSL's (etc) just like every other US company.
And banks and insurances for credit ratings. And for screening companies, that are contracted to evaluate your job application on basis of your purchases, locations and so on
Please everyone help the other options survive, even if you don't personally like them or use them. There is no way legislators are ever going to catch up on their technical knowledge enough to manage even the most blatant monopoly. Who am I kidding, they wouldn't care anyway. Somebody has to get in there to offer competition and keep things honest. Having options improves all of the options.
Firefox on Mac is noticeably slower.
It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
It works well on windows, I don't know how far the mac support is.
WebRender does work on macOS (and Android and maybe Linux), but Mozilla is prioritizing a Windows MVP first (because something like 90% of Firefox users are on Windows). Work on macOS, Linux, and Android will then resume.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Yet how long will we have it if everyone keeps using excuses to continue using Chrome?
Disclaimer: I contribute to Firefox and enjoy it quite a bit.
You can also disable smooth scrolling only for the touchpad in about:config to keep the animation for scrolling with the keyboard. Search for "smooth"; I think it's the mouseWheel one, but I'm not at home to verify.
On Ubuntu and Kali (both debian-based), it most certainly does.
I assume that Chrome has a similar design, but I'm not familiar with it.
Firefox has mostly strived, in the Quantum era, to stay mostly-ish compatible with Google's interpretation of WebExtensions, from what I can tell.
For what it's worth, Chrome stopped doing this for me in a recent update (I think version 71).
As someone who always has too many tabs open, I consider this a plus.
I do however think you can disable this in about:config : browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Today I'm browsing the Adidas website, and the images don't load for any of the products in Firefox.
https://www.adidas.com/us/ultraboost-all-terrain-ltd-shoes/B...
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
Kind of, only because Google uses the ShadowDOM API to break its product on competing browsers and playing into it will only reinforce this behavior.
Other web developers may want to chime in but I rarely have cross-browser problems between Firefox and Chrome. I can't recall the last one.
The only time I encounter a problem with Firefox is looking at people's codepens where they're using webkit only prefixes or a draft API.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.
Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.
Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.
If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
We are the guinea pig.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
[0] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.
Don't mean to insult you, and some people just have an easier time opening up about everything, but a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
> a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Ever familiar with the phrase "un unexamined life is not worth living"? Here, of course, the thing to be examined is your belief that a life with nothing whatsover to hide is limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Why? In what ways is Chrome more useful than Firefox on Chrome OS?
Moreover I use Chrome to sync my Google account, including passwords (which I can't live without) and browsing history.
If you are ok with that and still think you have nothing to hide, ask yourself if you’d be ok with this trove of data ever being exposed publicly.
Ever googled something embarrassing? Perhaps a medical condition or symptom? Sent a very personal email? Visited a less than savory location, or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
I already did, and the answer was "Yes, I'd be okay" (although the likelihood of that happening is extremely rare).
> Ever googled something embarrassing?
Use incognito mode.
> Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
I have only one medical condition, which I'm not embarassed to talk about publicly (I already do it).
> Sent a very personal email?
I rarely send "very personal"/ intimate information over email in lieu of just talking over phone.
> Visited a less than savory location,
Never in my life.
> or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I never had to do it (why would I?).
> I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
If--note "if"--I were to engage in an activity that could potentially be used to blackmail or harm me in any way, I would of course be doing it in as private manner as possible. However it would be silly to spend the rest of my normal life cowering and being phobic to technological advances.
> Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
You confuse being naive (in its original sense of the word) with being ignorant. But I guess that's what fear does to one.
All this means is that it's not stored on your computer/history. This doesn't mean Google doesn't still have everything from those periods.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-re...
This is a flawed study by a Google's competitor (the for-profit organization called DuckDuckGo). FTA:
> Following the study’s publication this morning, Google told The Verge in a statement that it found the methodology flawed and the findings misleading. “This study’s methodology and conclusions are flawed since they are based on the assumption that any difference in search results are based on personalization. That is simply not true,” a Google spokesperson said. “In fact, there are a number of factors that can lead to slight differences, including time and location, which this study doesn’t appear to have controlled for effectively.”
and:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520
Facts won't change being facts no matter how many times you downvote them. :-P
Google also operates some of the most popular DNS services 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 which can capture domains you query from your IP.
There are various measures you can go through to stop this to some degree, like DNS blocking, client-side ad/tracker blocking, VPNs etc. but to go all-out is very cumbersome and I'm not convinced that it would even be 100% effective. Google's business DEPENDS on collecting your data and tracking you, and they are very, very good at it. I highly recommend reading "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism".
For a lot of people they possibly hold that view due to a lack of understanding about the situation, but some people like you understand the situation and still are OK with it. That's an entirely reasonable point of view which should be eagerly debated with.
People are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest. I recall reading a forum, where a guy asked for medical advice, because he was diagnosed with fibrosis (his lungs basically got scarred all over). His work required him to continuously inhale toxic exhaust, and he wanted a way to avoid further health complications (but keep a work!) because "the pay was good".
Fibrosis causes you to cough non-stop and significantly increases probability of dying from lung infection. Compared to that, using Google's products does not result in any visible long-term effects on health. Therefore, it is natural to conclude, that using Google's sites and services is safe, healthy and should be widely encouraged. It does not matter, that Google uses anti-competitive practices to monopolize market, restrict user freedom and lead us to future, when we won't be able to refuse shoehorned "services", shoved in our face, right?
Please stop with those creepy "understanding" antics. Encouraging self-harm is bad, and wishing to view advertisements is definitely a form of self-harm.
You are essentially deciding for me that what I choose to do with my technological choices is "a form of self-harm" (when in fact I only experience total pleasure).
Is it really that hard to comprehend that, when one does not share the alarmist feelings of the crowd, they will make intelligent choices based on personal preferences?
So if you don't mind would you share some nudes, your CC numbers and your medical history with us?
That's not your call to make.
However, if this data ever gets into the hands of someone acting in bad faith, even the most innocent behaviour can be weaponized against you. Let's say, for example, that you are wrongly suspected of committing a crime, and the investigating police are more interested in cooking up a conviction than determining if you actually did it.
All sorts of details about your life can be leaked and "spun" to make you look very, very bad. You went to a bar on a certain evening? So did these known crime figures. Were you meeting them?
You spend time on Hacker News. HACKER NEWS. You could find yourself the target of a smear campaign designed to turn public sentiment against you.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."—Cardinal Richelieu
If you hand over your data without hesitation to a nation-state or to powerful and unscrupulous corporations, I believe you will discover that there is no such thing as "nothing to hide."
Someone could be alarmed about the state of privacy in society and not want to take an extreme action.
It seems entirely reasonable to want to remain a part of civilization and advocate for change on a topic you are passionate about.
Chrome used to be very lightweight, fast and basically unseated IE as the top browser. It got that love because at the time Firefox was bloated and IE had a stranglehold. Chrome was also safer with a process per tab. Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile. Chrome (and Safari) or Webkit pushed HTML5/Canvas/WebGL/SVG into real world use which changed the landscape of browsers.
Nowadays Chrome is bloated like Firefox was, has a stranglehold like IE did, is now pushing its own market standards and breaking existing open/market standards and generally being a forceful, non respecting to standards, web browser. It sure is unfortunate and another sign that bizdev/marketing/executives rule over engineers at Google now.
And didn't get to this spot on any kind of technical or feature merits, but essentially by relentless nagging on the Google search page to have users install it. Sure, devs/geeks etc were eager early adopters, but the bulk of users were steered this way by Google.
This is the big one for me. When I'm not developing I actually prefer to use Safari-- I like it's interface better and it feels more at home in macOS. It's "good enough" too.
What I'm really a user of is the Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox's are looking quite solid lately but I just haven't switched over.
Firefox highlights the edge lines of the selected element automatically, and in all directions (if I recall correctly). I have to use an extension – VisBug – to achieve that in Chrome.
There's also the fonts window, which lets you in on what fonts are used on the page, and lets you modify the selected element's font settings – size, weight, slant/italic etc.. I pay a lot of attention to typography, so that part is important to me.
Also that it's not Chrome or based on Chromium is reason alone to like Firefox, because we need diversity for healthy web standards. That Chromium is open source is a red herring and open standards are more important.
I know developers have been preferring Chrome and for good reasons, but I've switched back to Firefox for the last 3 years and personally I find it hard to use Chrome these days, because Firefox has a better UI.
The only downside is that Chrome's dev tools still has some capabilities that Firefox lacks, but Firefox has been improving a lot, as you have seen.
I tried Firefox for a month. I didn't like it. I went back to a Chromium fork.
Now go away.
2. There's a general passive-combative conversation about browsers going on ("I like Firefox, I don't get why people like Chrome" and vice versa) that I never wanted to be a part of, mostly because of how disrespectful and counterproductive it is.
3. In a thread about ad-blocking, I got what is effectively an ad for Firefox.
I don't want any of this nonsense on my side of the table. "Use my product because I value it!" No, go away, I don't need this.
My choices are rarely uninformed. I spend time considering what to pick where I'm able to. I'd like my choices to be respected as such – not have my face plastered with someone else's unprompted opinion.
Here's an example of a better conversation:
– I liked this part of Firefox, and I wish it was in Chrome too.
– Do you not like Firefox whole, then? If so, why?
– Because of X, Y, and Z. I used it intensely for a month or so, so I got a good look at the way it behaves. I know X is solvable, but not Y or Z (I tried), and they're critical to my browsing experience.
– Okay, I see. I hope you consider (browser diversity, or whatever issues using Firefox's supposed to solve), because they're important.
– Oh yeah? Can you tell me why?
...and so on. A respectful conversation that sparks curiosity and provides context, without annoying any of the parties in the process.
Otherwise, you get what you give. Seems a fair approach to me.
You'd like your choices to be respected, but you are incapable of offering civility. Is that also a choice we should respect, or is it beyond your control?
"My name is Bond. James Bond."
Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
Microsoft have been stalling IE development for years, which allowed Mozilla to gain huge marketshare. This resulted in a lot of people learning, how to install a third party web browser. By the time Chrome was unveiled, Mozilla have coincidentally slowed Firefox development to a crawl. I remember the point, when the stable Firefox version was close to unusable, while everyone technologically proficient used a development release. It have been so bad, that some addons simply recommended not using the stable Firefox version. Btw, things have only gotten worse since then.
Chrome's dazzling success is result of it's aggressive advertising as well as sabotage and mismanagement, that killed off alternatives.
EDITED: re-phrased for clarification.
I tried using Firefox for Linux for about 6 months last year, but had to give up. I got frustrated with the random UI pauses/latency, random crashes, and broken web rendering (not its fault). On the other hand, Chrome just works, and provides a very smooth, low latency experience on Linux. I don't like that I have to give up my privacy for a decent browsing experience on Linux, but that's the state of things.
I am honestly perplexed what the issue could be then, I was sure you were using an NVidia with the proprietary drivers or something like that, as such setups have caused me trouble in the past.
The only thing is I wouldn't recommend turning on WebRender for everything yet, but it's not on by default so I doubt you had it on.
Check their dev blog, they add cool features every couple of weeks:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ChromeDevelopers/videos
I recall this is what I had to do for Safari since there wasn’t a supported extension for the new browser yet.
This would lessen our dependency on a browser for ad blocking in this ongoing browser war.
It's better to just not let a browser that's user hostile enough to prevent ad blocking win a browser war.
I can throw facebook's servers into my hosts file, but what if I want to permit connections to facebook servers if and only if I am on facebook.com? uMatrix makes that trivial.
And I completely agree with you regarding ideological reasons to use FF. You don't have to be a zealot to value your privacy.
Power users won't stand for this sort of thing and will switch to Firefox. Firefox, in turn, will gain greater development mindshare.
In aggregate, these privacy and "ads above all" stories will continue to taint the Google brand. Many of my layperson friends are starting to worry about their privacy when using Google products--it's a good thing!
How on Earth does "Comorbidities Associated with Plaque Psoriasis | Dermatology Times" on page 10 have a higher PageRank and relevance for the search query "uBlock Origin" than https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ?
1. Chrome web store
2. ublock.org
3. Microsoft store
4. Wikipedia
5. Mozilla addon, and finally
6. Gorhill's github for ublock origin.
Can we finally say that DDG is better for some searches than Google?
I think we're close. For some things, it's still not the best but instead of going to <insert another search engine here>, I try to modify my query to scope to what I'm looking for.
In a crude example, if I'm looking for the "LoadCrashDump" method,, which is specific to ClrMD[0], I can simply construct my query as "ClrMD: LoadCrashDump".
[0] - https://github.com/Microsoft/clrmd/blob/ac36603e37ef7c8ba05d...
Let's hope I'm right. :)
It’s funny when you think of it, now both browsers want to shove ads down my throat. I hate the modern internet.
I have my Firefox homepage set to a blank page and see nothing of the sort.
Because of your comment, I temporarily set my homepage back to "Firefox Home," but didn't see any ads. Just a a few recommended news articles.
Yes, google never shows you ads.
It's also worth pointing out that the included ads are targeted locally on your computer, and none of your browsing data gets sent to Mozilla (https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...).
And it's also really easy to turn them off (preferences > home > "sponsored stories").
It bothers me that iOS doesn’t support addons to Firefox mobile. But on Android you can even install ublock origin
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...
It doesn't work on reddit, which makes up a lot of page visits for most people. Also, they can't defuse/bypass anti-adblock scripts.
Why does this always happen? Why is it when google commits murder, someone mentions that firefox was caught jaywalking?
They also disabled user-provided unsigned addons, even when you authorize them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
Super Metroid in 1992 had customizable keys. Mozilla gets $500 million a year and can't even keep a feature it had 3 years ago. I shouldn't be disappointed about failure to get basic things right, when they're suppose to be the great bulwark against those who wish to control your machine?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
I have a hard time understanding why, with widescreen so common nowadays, it isn't a standard native feature in all browsers.
I think we're at Stage 3.
Even in the most skeptical reading of the situation, Google never "embraced" adblockers, they allowed them. You'll note there's no extensions on Chrome for Android for example.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/14/17011266/google-chrome-ad...
Installing Firefox on mobile today. Time to prep.
It's different for everyone, but for me it started with this gmail redesign that made the product so slow it's almost worthless to me. And worst of all is I feel like there isn't even a good competing service to switch to.
And now Chrome...
Then people started to realize Google only introduces products that collect data in a new way from its other products. If it can't survive that test then it doesn't exist. Ugh.
They literally removed the don't be evil motto as the reason for their conduct.
People will say that they still have, but that's just a stupid line at the end. They used to have a whole preface dedicated to it and have the code of conduct based around it.
I personally still use Firefox at home despite recent issues, but I honestly would prefer having both as an option, plus I always recommend uBlock Origin to everyone.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Chrome, opinions are mine and not my employer's.)
Of course I can disable it if I want. But, I wish I could simply trust my browser vendor to do the right thing.
The browser itself seems solid, I've been happy since Quantum and look forward to seeing WebRender rollout.
Only had about 15 active tabs (though a number of dormant ones since last FF restart). Between the various processes, FF was using about 6-7GB of memory. Closing almost all of the tabs reclaimed about 2GB, so still a lot left over.
That said I'm not too bothered, I can restart FF every other week or so.
epic burn
Before they dropped Edge, a move like this would have been a great marketing opportunity for Microsoft: "Come to Edge, where your ad blocker still works."
then they'd be able to sell their browser as having ad blocking when chrome doesn't
the market would take care of the rest
If feel they have enough impunity to get away with that, then it is no surprise that they will try to put other ad blockers out of business too.
Other ad networks might be big enough to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google (although they probably won't last long enough) but Ad Blocking is such a niche market that they couldn't possibly sue.
Great.
We can only hope.
And why does trump picking him make him automatically a disaster?
I feel like this is being completely dismissive of any kind of progress that could be made because orange man is bad.
Because President Trump doesn't have a great record in picking nor retaining people.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-...
Google (and the Silicon Valley behemoths): Currently know a lot of personal information about the citizenry
The US Government: Wants to know this information
Neither are necessarily deserving of or entitled to this information, so we shouldn't be cheering for either side.
Antitrust is less the issue than personal information / privacy / data tracking regulation. Antitrust enforcement is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
It's been confirmed they've had lots of forms of access many times in the past. Seems naive to believe anything would be different today.
I think any data the NSA has would be stringently guarded and only used for high-profile / high-impact cases. If the NSA was constantly feeding data to other agencies about trivialities, then it would raise red flags about where "all this incriminating evidence" came from.
Cases involving StingRay interceptions have been dropped so as to protect the details of such interceptions.
There's also the relationship between the agency and the Government to consider. The CIA don't seem to get along very well with various members of the US Government, and with "good" members such as Ron Wyden, if the NSA was feeding ill-gotten data to the US Govt, then someone like him would probably raise some kind of stink.
This doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether the NSA has this data, it's more about the potential mitigation of the likelihood of the data being actually used against someone.
Much like we don't know where the line is on the potential for Huawei kit to be a threat to national security.
Something. Not nothing.
Edited to add: There's also the very likely situation where Government policy / regulation is put in place to cover all parties, and the NSA ignores this anyway because they're above the law. Everyone else must play by the rules, the US Govt looks to be doing the right thing.
(this isn't a bitter statement, merely that I think this is how things actually work, whether for the US or any other country; realpolitik)
Didn't Snowden attest in an interview to NSA officers using webcam intercepts to get their rocks off?
You may as well question the purpose of the FDA regulating slaughterhouses since vegetarians have been found a way to avoid doing business with them. That's a nonsense position. A vegetarian should demand that the FDA regulate the meat industry, and a firefox user should demand regulation for corporations they've avoided.
How do you measure this? Does the public include content creators who rely on ads for their livelihood?
Correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position, but I vaguely recall a discussion some time ago in which you compared adblocking to theft. If I'm remembering that correctly, you and I have no common ground upon which to have a civil discussion.
So you disagree with google deplatforming alex jones?
Additionally, I thought his removal from YouTube was as a result of pressure from the Government on hate speech and fake news etc. All the stuff Facebook is also attempting to crack down on.
The (bad actors within the) advertising industry are the enemy of people whose livelihoods depend on Internet advertising because they're the ones making ads either bandwidth-hogging, epilepsy-inducing, website-avoidingly annoying, privacy-invasive, or an actual virus/malware vector.
This is, directly, what has caused the popularity of ad blockers to skyrocket. Tech-savvy folks protecting their family from these dangers by installing ad-blocking software so they don't get regular family-tech-support calls about the various issues potentially arising from "bad" advertising.
Follow-up questions:
How many user ad clicks / views does it take for the revenue to be critical to one's livelihood?
Could you consider donations through any of the various options like Patreon?
Chrome has a responsibility not just to the end user but also to the website. The cost of the getting the web page's info was viewing the ads. Why should the browser help the user to commit virtual theft?
Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense. Lots of people make a living via web ads. Google makes billions on ads. It's a real source of real money. Alternatives could, and should!, be considered. But simply cutting off a revenue stream while arguing that the ability to cut off that revenue stream should be protected by regulators is weak at best.
Yes, yes, yes, and more yes. That's the cause that needs treating. Apologies if I wasn't clear, that's definitely where I think the regulation should be looking towards.
Regulate what's within your jurisdiction. That's all any government can do in any circumstance. If regulation results in more friendly advertising that's less likely to have users reaching for the blockers, then those advertisers are going to be more successful, and so even those in unregulated countries will need to conform in order to compete.
That's assuming that the number of users that have already reached for the blockers are of a significant enough percentage to make a difference to website ad revenue.
Start somewhere or stay nowhere.
Chrome is the user agent. It acts purely on behalf of the user. Browsers aren't trojans built to exploit my eyeballs. This "virtual theft" talk is as silly as claiming that spam filters should be illegal - your server sent me some markup, and I'm free to preprocess it in any way I want.
> Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense.
Not really. Advertising has always been about manipulating people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't do - if all ads were purely informative it'd hardly be a multibillion dollar industry.
Why is it abuse? No one is being forced to use chromium. Are you abusing your market position when you buy the cheapest toothbrush in a manner that's harmful to other toothbrush companies?
Google can easily force the other browsers to lose the Web Request API, because maintaining it when they're the only ones using it is a net loss of productivity, which will probably be needed elsewhere.
On the other hand, Google is getting bigger, expanding and hiring more people as the list of their failed projects increase. The chances of them screwing up their core products seems to be increasing, from my point of view. If they manage to do that, that would negate an inevitable future collision with anti-trust regulators. As for the EU and the GDPR I’m sure we are seeing the earliest warning shots and it’s going to be a big mess for them.
It's not possible for people to be well educated in everything and, as hard as it is to swallow for us techy types, a fair percentage of people don't have the time or inclination to even realise the potential down sides of using the Internet. They're too busy with whatever their own areas of expertise are.
Maintaining this shit is hard for a pro. The amateurs don't deserve to get shafted.
On basis of what exactly? What is google doing wrong?
I am curious to hear. Don't downvote me.
Maybe you would concede that some reasonable people think they have in the past?
Like FTC investigators (albeit overruled by their bosses): http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
Or Eric Schmidt: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-a-monopoly-were-in...
Winning argument was
> It takes me all of 10 seconds to type duckduckgo.com, and maybe 30 to switch default search engines for the browser. [1][2]
But an equivalent, i can just download FF in 10 seconds is not acceptable in this context. why? Infact, Google browser is way less dominant that the search engine.
> I suspect a reply to your comment isn't going to change your stance on whether Google is dancing around in the anti-trust/monopoly area.
Why is that? Sounds a bit patronising.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046158
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046382
It wasn't meant to be patronizing. People's views on anti-trust law vary enough that I don't expect a debate to settle things.
We've already seen far greater market share from a browser. That browser lost it's market share when it stopped serving consumers. It lost it so thoroughly that decades and billions later it still can't recoup it.
Why would you want the government to hurt Firefox and the other competitors who would be happy to compete with Google on this front?
Exactly, we are the product they are selling
> the 30,000 limit is not sufficient to enforce the famous EasyList alone).
For the few extra ad clicks they'll gain, it's just not worth the upset.
So in light of that, I see no reason to not assume malice in this case too.