if you haven't already use Firefox and recognize that this is a fundamental question of freedom and whether you want the internet to be controlled by dystopian corporate advertisement monoliths or institutions that care about your rights.
Every time this comes up and 80% of discussions is about whether the tab bar in firefox is flat or three pixels wide instead of five makes me more depressed
Fair criticism of Firefox is that it is dependent on Mozilla 'the org' which is a pretty shaky foundation to base such a critical component on. Witness the exodus of even die hard supporters over the last couple of years. That has nothing to do with minor UI details.
Firefox open source. If the Mozilla foundation is as questionable as some like to claim then why isn't there any effort to fork Gecko. We have more than enough Blink/Chromium based browsers already.
Wasn't aware of Waterfox and I mistakenly thought Pale Moon was just a de-branding. Looking at Pale Moon's site, it's clear that it's a whole other branch now (like Blink/WebKit/kHTML).
I'm happy with Firefox (and Mozilla) personally but I'll be sure to recommend these if/when I hear people asking for an alternative to Google and Mozilla in the future.
For literally the reasons we're already discussing: to offer an alternative to Chrome.
If every browser is based on Chromium then you're not really offering an alternative to Google Chrome because Google still own the supply chain. Not only in terms of your new browser's rendering engine but also in terms of website owners being vindicated in targeting Chrome.
The only way to offer a legitimate counterargument to Chrome is not to use Blink.
I think that's backwards. Gecko requires constant and expensive work to keep up with Blink. And it has been falling behind.
Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google.
If you want to offer a legitimate counter argument to Chrome by using Gecko then you have to find some way to bring in the hundreds of millions of dollars of necessary funding to bring Gecko up to Blink's quality.
If you want to create a counter argument to Chrome using Blink, then you have everything you need already.
I do appreciate the difficulty of maintaining a rendering engine (I wrote my own browser in the late 90s) but let's not over dramatise Gecko's position, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for years and almost never find a website that couldn't work in it (the only instances when it doesn't work is when someone throws up a demo of some unstandardised and bleeding edge Chrome API). Plus lets not forget that Mozilla are still actively working on Gecko so it's not like all responsibility falls on us tomorrow.
The bigger issue for me isn't the maintenance of Gecko; I just can't see how extending Blinks market share really hurts Google in any way. Ultimately Blink-based browsers are still tied into Google's supply chain so even if you did displace Chrome with a Blink-based competitor, Google still win.
unilaterally implementing unstable APIs and telling people on web.dev that "it's safe you can use it it's totally production ready" isn't exactly quality, but you do you.
I’d prefer Firefox, but some functionality works inarguably better in chrome. One example is YouTube, which slams my processor due to the lack of hardware decoding.
The h264ify add-on will let your computer load YouTube videos more efficiently on Firefox, if it supports hardware acceleration for H.264 but not VP8/VP9.
You can compile/package the h264ify source code with only FOSS products, which can themselves be inspected and compiled from source. Your reasoning could be used to distrust any software, open source or not.
I’m not suggesting that you can’t trust any software, but the Mozilla App Store has proven to not be trustworthy. I avoid installing software from pip and npm also.
But you’re still missing the point, this should be compiled into Firefox core, if it’s a licensing thing badge it as Firefox-non free. Not everybody cares about altruistic goals, I just want a browser that works so I can do my job, securely.
Edit: but if you don’t already see a future where ultimately open source cannot be trusted unless it comes from a trusted repo (yum, apt) then you should start preparing for that.
In practice I've found that people claiming site X works in chrome but not in Firefox is usually incorrect, and unless you actually try it you won't know. I use Firefox and have done for 15+ years, and I genuinely can't remember the last time I had to switch browser to use a page or webapp.
Yes, but some of us are forced to. As long as Mozilla claims that implementing WebMIDI is impossible that's how it will remain. It's technically in there somewhere but it just doesn't work or requires all kinds of unstable trickery, not good enough for a normal user.
Firefox is very actively of the opinion that politically motivated people should decide what I see on the web. When that is their stance, I kindly nope the fuck out.
They are a browser maker, and I don't remember the last time they came out with anything really exciting. Vivaldi and Brave both have, and even Brave's stock Chrome UI has good stuff like a solid tab groups implementation that Firefox just doesn't have. There are extensions, but they just don't work the same.
I don't really find Google to be that dystopian. Chrome, gmail and google photos and search are all quite nice. Sure I can change if they get annoying.
I sort of agree. I use Firefox because ublock origin works best on it.
I still use gmail and youtube.
Search I switched to duckduckgo, no profiled results and the ! bangs is great. The google search popup when using incognito gets real annoying fast too.
Didn't Mozilla fire their devtools team ? FF devtools weren't up to Chrome as-is, and doesn't sound like they ever will be. FF seems like a sinking ship, not worth investing time in.
TBH I'm perfectly happy with Chrome and using Google accounts. The benefits of my data following me around seamlessly far outweighs the downsides of Google having access to it.
(I am a former Mozilla employee who was there when the layoffs happened)
This is what I know about what happened there:
There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.
My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.
But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.
Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.
I was put off by Firefox by some questionable opinionated decisions they made. I don't want a browser with a political agenda, just want one that that follows the specs and performs well.
Isn't Chrome making opinionated decisions (like this one), pushing a political agenda (anti-privacy, pro-corporatism, pro-monopoly etc) and abusing the standardisation process?
Every time this comes up and 80% of discussions is about whether the tab bar in firefox is flat or three pixels wide instead of five makes me more depressed