• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.

239 points

I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.

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93 points

It’s cool just come back and bring a friend with you.

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17 points
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Same here. I left for about 10 years but started coming back gradually a few years ago. After everything that happened this year, I made the full switch to Mozilla on all my devices. I’m very happy to be back though!

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10 points

Why is it such a big deal? I don’t regret anything. Back in the days when Google was a cool company and Chrome appeared, it totally made sense to use Chrome. After they gradually started to get more and more hostile, I switched to Firefox. It was just a matter of exporting and importing bookmarks and setting up some plugins. And changing the search engine.

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9 points
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I tried chrome when it released. It was a neat curiosity, but I never found it to perform so much better than Firefox that I needed to switch.

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8 points

Same, I deeply regret leaving. Mostly happened due to peer pressure in uni, where everybody was thinking google is cool, and you had to use a lot of google products for classwork. Now google has their tentacles attached all over my online life, and switching feels like preparing for a divorce. Though at least I’m not using Android anymore

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9 points

you could’ve just degoogled your phone, if it’s comatible with any custom ROMs. android itself is open source, but the preinstalled apps and services are not. that’s where the spyware is. (we will never even know how much spyware is embedded in IOS, because it’s closed source)

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2 points

No expert at all, but isn’t it the case that the phone is then somewhat marked as not trustworthy, making it impossible to use banking apps and such?

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7 points

You are forgiven. It’s an adventure.

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3 points

i feel like firefox used to suck

or did chrome used to not suck so much?

or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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1 point

When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.

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174 points

Switch? I never left!

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38 points

I deeply regret leaving.

Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).

Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.

Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.

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I had a similar history to you.

I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:

  • switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
  • switched Google Search Engine to searxng
  • switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
  • switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
  • switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
  • switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid

Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.

Well if you switched to iOS then there’s not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple’s browser engine.

Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.

There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.

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11 points

Apple might be the one company that is even worse than Google

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10 points

Aren’t all browsers on ios just Safari with a different skin?

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9 points

Yes but using Firefox you get bookmarks and history synced.

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8 points

To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s

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Porting your bookmarks back is easy. I had a similar experience except I switched back to Firefox in 2015.

If you use Firefox sync on PC and your phone, all your open tabs and bookmarks will be synced automatically.

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5 points

I was in the exact same boat as you. Except I also switched because Bitdefender, the anti-virus I used at the time, was not playing nice with Firefox.

Earlier this year, like a few months ago, I decided to try and switch back. It was seamless. In like half an hour I had every bookmark, most passwords, and even some new extensions that have saved me a lot of work since. I recommend you try it and keep Chrome installed on the side in case you run into some problems, but I think after a few days you’ll realize you don’t need it for much.

(in my case it’s still installed for when I inevitably remember that I forgot to transfer a random password that didn’t automatically migrate)

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4 points

Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android

“progress”

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14 points

Exactly. I’ve been here since Netscape Navigator.

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6 points

There are dozens of us!

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1 point

Got here from iCab.

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10 points

-🗿

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2 points

Same! The extensions are just to damned useful!

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1 point

Same. Literally been a user since version 1.

Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What’s happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.

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0 points

I did. Chrome updated plugins automatically, Firefox didn’t. Also one bad tab didn’t kill the whole browser.

Plugins are dead now, so I switched back. I’ve still had to kill FF in task manager, due to some weird PSN login bug.

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85 points

Tree. Style. Tabs.

Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.

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27 points

Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.

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26 points

Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I’m often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can “file away” a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.

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13 points

Have you tried tab session manager? I was planning on testing it to check if it provides additional value…

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5 points

Tree style tabs on it’s own just sounds like it would be enabling my tab-hoarding tendencies. But bookmarking entire trees of tabs is too good to pass up.

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1 point
*

Though loading the saved tree do only from sidebar (ctrl+b). Loading from bookmarks window is bugged, undoes trees upon loading.

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1 point

Use Vimium add-on and have a pop-up to search your open tab.

Or if you prefer no add-ons or don’t know how to use Vim keybindings then type your search query in the search bar like this:

% my tab title
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12 points

I’m not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don’t see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.

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6 points
*

If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it’s really nice. Most of the time you’re opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.

Specifically any job over the phone, it’s almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.

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5 points

Don’t get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don’t last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that’s a sign they should be cleaned up.

On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.

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1 point

You can still group better.

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10 points

Right?

The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs

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4 points

Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It’s frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.

Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.

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2 points

It does one level of nesting with tab groups. Just drag one tab onto another to start.

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6 points

Just wanna jump in here an md mention sideberry as an alternativ, does the same thing, but better imo and has tons of customisation options

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4 points

Combine that with their multi-account containers and you got yourself a stew, honey!

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4 points

internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn’t have the tree view :p

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3 points

I wish it was the default (or at least a built in option). It’s a bit annoying to still have to use workarounds to remove the default tab bar.

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1 point

It’s this on Firefox Android?

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6 points

Pretty sure, the whole sidebar concept doesn’t exist on Firefox Android, so very likely no…

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4 points
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Unfortunately no, but honestly I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal vertical screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.

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4 points

I mostly just want a tab grouping system like android chrome had.

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1 point

I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal screen.

The pages window but with draggable, treeable, tabs/pages.

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1 point

I could never get used to tab managers like these IF the tabs are still shown in the top of Firefox.

Simple Tab Groups is something that I can get used to, because it works pretty similar as it does with Safari.

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2 points

There’s CSS you can apply that hide the tabs, but it’s not a straightforward process to apply it.

I wonder if I could script it? Hmm. (I’ve written a developer environment setup script at work that I could add that to…)

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82 points

Just because Google broke the most trafficked site on the internet for Firefox doesn’t mean its a bad browser. Hell that’s a ringing endorsement.

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26 points

Personally I’d rather stop using any Google services, than handing them a Chrome monopoly. Google is already way to dominant IMO.

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You should stop using Google services anyway. They are terrible for privacy and for your digital freedom in general. And there are so many alternatives.

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3 points

I absolutely try to limit it. I use Qwant for search. I don’t use gmail except to register Android. In android I don’t use google services like calendar. I only use Google play for 1 app that is only available through Google play.
My biggest dependency is probably YouTube, which I must admit I use a lot.

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1 point

I am trying to slowly quit all Google services

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7 points

I didn’t notice they broke it. The website works on my Firefox as usual. Maybe you lack some plugins? (like ublock origin, sponsor block, age restriction bypass…)

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1 point
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5 points

I still don’t see that they broke FF specifically, they’re fighting back against adblockers, including the ones in browsers like brave.

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28 points

They added a literal sleep(5000) to the javascript for youtube accessed via firefox.

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5 points
  1. Hasn’t been happening on my Firefox
  2. There have been reports on other browsers as well, so this isn’t a firefox specific issue (p sure I’ve seen some people that use chrome claim they had this issue)
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3 points

From what I’ve gathered from other threads, it’s meant to target ad blockers, not Firefox users. It appears though that Firefox users ended up in the crossfire, while uBO can be rigged to block the sleep() function in that case, nullifying the wait.

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1 point

which site is that? Google search page? it works fine for me in every browser I’ve ever tried it on.

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60 points

The best time to switch to Firefox was 19 years ago when it first came into existence. The 2nd best time is now.

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22 points

my cubicle wall poster I sent money for. yw

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1 point

For a few years there I was on the border, extensions used to make firefox extremely unstable, along with it being primarily multithreaded rather than multiprocess. Now it’s much better. I know a lot of people don’t like what the “quantum project” did, but I love it. Now a tab might crash because of some shitty plugin or something but the rest is fine.

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