I personally don’t use Firefox as anything except a spare whenever a page doesn’t load right in Vivaldi. Not only because I strongly dislike the way Mozilla itself is run (I’m not even going to get into their financial records) but also because of it’s glacial development speed. Mozilla does pave the road in some ways with stuff like mobile extensions and an unprecedented amount privacy features. But it still takes them forever to do some of the most basic stuff. Still no native PWA’s, Passkeys are still under development. It mildly feels understandable why people don’t feel like testing with Firefox as much as they used to.
Even cutting Google’s monopoly over the internet out of the equation, Firefox still doesn’t feel that good. Sure, it might be the fastest browser on the market at the moment. But for a company being paid 450k for a search engine deal by the very thing that Firefox users hate, what gives with the amount of ads engrained in search and bookmarks, the occasional popups for Mozilla VPN/ FF Relay. And yes, I know you can turn them off, but it’s ridiculous that a FOSS product even has them to begin with. Also how difficult it feels to be involved in the development of all Firefox products over on Mozilla Connect + Bugzilla + GitHub.
I have nothing against gecko based browsers, but until I see something truly stunning, I don’t really want to bother. I know Librewolf exists and solves some of the problems with modern Firefox (also being even more hardened than Firefox), but given Librewolf is also a hobby project that deliberately doesn’t accept donations nor even provide an auto update mechanism on macOS (the main system I use, in combination with my pixel devices), the bus factor is too strong for me to consider.
I used Edge, because it’s genuinely an extremely feature packed browser, but when Google announced the manifest v3, I jumped to Firefox.
Unpopular Lemmy opinion, but I hate it. Firefox always freezes on desktop, especially on YouTube. Firefox on Android feels like it was developed for Android 8.0 and never updated. And the worst part is there’s a bug on the desktop version in the print preview window when it comes to printing shipping labels, so I have not been able to use Firefox for my company for over 8 months now.
I’ve reported the bug every time Firefox updates and the bug persists, but Mozilla doesn’t give a shit. It’s so frustrating.
Because it appeals to furries.
It’s the only viable browser engine that isn’t chromium-based. And it’s open source and very functional.
When it first came it out it was slow slow slow. They’ve fixed that. Admittedly their search engine returns “sparse” results compared to google, but their security and commitment to privacy is worth the dearth of ‘hits’ to my more esoteric searches.
