Firefox release notes: we improved the privacy of our browser
Chrome release notes: fuck you and fuck your fucking adblock
Clarity is needed here. The California language that sparked all this is qualified with “about FakeSpot’s products and services”. Meaning it could simply be third-party services that they send their own emails through.
After reading their privacy policy, nothing jumps out at me that contradicts this.
To be clear, I’m not a fan of the extension’s collection practices, but the down votes could be because this may be unwarranted fear.
Unwarranted fear or healthy skepticism? This is the perfect time to “just ask questions.” Firefox is selling itself as a privacy respecting platform and therefore should be held to a higher standard than the garbage that is chrome. If it can pass the test it will be proven again and earn more trust which should result in more users, if it fails then it deserves to be criticised and lose users. Point is if you are selling yourself as privacy respecting you are selling yourself by default as ethical.
No idea why people use Brave when Firefox exists
Well, it said right there in the article that until today, Brave was that only browser that would truncate tracker tags when copying a URL to clipboard.
Moar browsers == moar innovation.
Interesting, in the past Brave injected their own affiliate links into URLs. That alone should tell you not to use it.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
Default Brave blocks ads more aggressively than default Firefox. Of course you can achieve that with Firefox + uBlock Origin, but add-ons are not available on iOS and iPad OS.
That’s just my experience. I still use Firefox + Firefox Focus BTW. To block more aggressively, I also use VPN + Adguard Home.
This. Only reason I use Brave is for my iPhone (which I am already planning to jump back to Android when it’s time for a new phone) because I can listen to YouTube videos/music in the background and no ads when going through the browser (another reason I’m going back to Android is for Revanced). Everything else is FF
Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.
To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.
As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.
Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.
Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.
To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.
As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.
Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.
The only reason why I still have Brave installed is because some sites don’t work with Firefox. Like Webflow’s editor. At least they claim it’s not supported yet.
I use chromium for that, there are many better browsers (even chromium forks) than braves IMO.
Because Firefox Android sucks, no trolling. It’s slow and in some pages, specially with video DRM don’t even work. Two, there are features lacking on Firefox for few use cases like clipboard with VNC “Your browser is not configured to allow access to your computer’s clipboard”. Besides, people here are so politically biased that they are capable of justify some crap that comes with Firefox such as pocket full of ads, ads by default on Android in the main page, and other less “shady” things, like Mozilla CEOs salary. I will be open to considerate again by default if Firefox Android receives a great performance upgrade. Something that I liked about brave here is that they said it will support MV2 extensions when MV3 comes.
Maybe try the testing branch (called ‘Firefox for testers’, or better yet, fennec)?
I’m using Firefox Nightly on Android, there is not other bleeding edge branch. On desktop the story is completely different. Listen, I’m not here because of the politics. Eich is shit because his postures about gay marriage, we all know that. I am here exclusively to talk about performance and what is the better tech stack of browsers.
oooh the Copy Link without Site Tracking feature looks like it would be pretty useful
You may want to check out ClearURLs https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/clearurls/
Firefox’s been killing it recently
Hopefully between Firefox’s recent streak of good releases and Google majorly jumping the shark lately we’ll see Chrome marketshare take a dive.
Cloudflare says 4.7%. I trust them more with these statistics because
- they serve a significant chunk of the internet
- they collect data serverside and I’m pretty sure more people block tracking scripts than change their user agent
But yes, it’s way too small
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Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.
I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)
Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)
The only issue is some websites don’t like to load in Librewolf. Windy.tv for example. I’ve never had any serious browser issues in Firefox lately.
