Chromium has better features, but with google announcing its plan to ‘drm the internet’ I 'm not sure if it’d be a good idea.
What better features? Firefox has pretty much everything nowadays, and is as fast as Chrome.
Chromium browsers have only 1 feature I need: access to the Chromecast API. I have 3, Firefox can’t connect to them and the last 2-3 times I tried the listed 3rd party methods (fx bridge, etc), I could never get it to work.
Were it not for that, I’d be back on Firefox.
well? what do you have? I would love to flush my chromecasts but they’re so useful.
Have you tried setting browser.casting.enabled = true in Firefox’s about:config settings?
Trust me, I’ve tried everything there is. For hours, literally. Nothing worked.
(Casting from Firefox (beta) on Android.)
It doesn’t have translations. I use it anyway, but it’s a minor inconvenience as I live in a foreign country.
Translations might be coming soon
Done locally on the device, so no risk of personal info going to some company
From the comments I’m noticing a trend
- Google Chromecast issues
- Not allowed to do background effects in Google meet
and from personal experience:
- issues using the store to update add-ons on Google docs
- can’t authenticate desktop Google drive
I use a lot of Google products, but avoid Chrome because of nonsense like this. Firefox works fine for everything else EXCEPT certain Google products. Feels intentional
100% intentional. If you spoof your browser signature most work just fine
Google Meet background effects actually work in Firefox if you spoof Firefox user agent to Chrome, I kid you not.
It should work soon without it. Google is just being google and takes its time to fix the problem they created in the first place.
This is exactly why companies spend money on marketing, people remember these ideas and internalize them as their justification long after it stops being true. And Chrome being fast hasn’t been true for a long time.
It still wins most benchmarks, so it’s technically true. Although not really enough to matter on desktop where it’s millisecond differences
Edge’s vertical tabs and grouping. Every solution on Firefox feels half-baked.
On Android tablets, most non-Firefox browsers support a tab bar, and tablet optimised UI. Firefox is just a giant stretched phone layout. I like to use the same browser on all platforms so I can sync tabs, so Firefox being crap on my tablet rules it out for my other devices too.
I uae Fennec, which is a better (but just okay) android browser from f-droid based on firefox. It has firefox sync. Just fyi.
There are a lot of articles exposing each option. Personally I prefer chromium based browsers because they support full site isolation (sandboxing) of each tab.
I tried googling about Chrome containerization of tabs and found nothing. Can you elaborate?
In fact, searching “chrome tab containerization” only results in discussions asking if there’s a way to use something like firefox’s containers on chrome. -
Also isn’t that what Firefox containers do?
It’s not per tab, but I don’t see how that would be useful. I add specific topics and then make / destroy the containers as needed.
It’s already annoying enough logging into the sites per container, I can’t imagine doing that every time I open a tab.
I was talking about site isolation which is nog available in all of Firefox versions, my apologies!
Looks like it has been in the base Firefox since 2021: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission
Do you mean sandboxing? Isn’t this just Firefox’s project Fission, which is already implemented?
It’s done for Windows, in work on Linux and android as far as I know. Android is really bad , Linux so so . I use Firefox on Linux but not android. mainly since you get both chromium webview and Firefox , but Sandboxing an issue as well.
On Android I use Vanadium, I think there is a lot of work to be done for mobile still.
I’ve been using Firefox at home for as long as I can remember. I’ve not found anything I can’t do with it yet.
If something doesn’t work you can always try it in edge of something either way.
Firefox doesn’t support background effects in Google Meet so i can’t blur my background during my daily work meetings. That’s the only reason i still have to use Chromium browsers
I’m guessing you don’t work in corporate environment or no longer work from home.
There are times when video is expected to be on, but you don’t want to show your room to everyone.
Having said that I can’t think of firefox being able to stream video yet not being able to do this, so likely it is Google’s way to make its competitor look subpar. Probably can be fixed by spoofing user agent. Ironically the most recent change in Chrome will make this very difficult in the future.
Lots of reasons. You may not want clients or outside vendors to be looking into your home, which is IMO a sort of intimate thing. I have a client who has a custom, branded background so things look more professional and cohesive - very important in the financial field (or so I’m told). Or maybe your WFH setup is in the kitchen because that’s the only space you had to put it and you don’t want your kids, pets, and spouse ducking into and out of every meeting you have.
Did you try agent spoofing (which probably won’t work in the future because of this). This sounds like things Microsoft (and now Google) does to make their product look better.
Unless you really like things like CSS Overview and Sleeping Tabs and the intuitive extension bar you should switch to Firefox. It has container tabs and is a lot more resource efficient.
Is it, though? They seem very comparable to me these days.
That, and I’m pretty sure one of the multiple extensions I use to make Youtube watchable has a memory leak, because I do end up having to restart it periodically.
And yeah, I do miss the automatic tab grouping feature, trying to replicate it is such a hassle on Firefox.
Crucially, though, I still main Firefox despite all that, so… I guess that’s my vote.
I’ve never encountered such issues and when they do happen they’re very random and not “periodically”. I have no idea what you mean by “automatic tab grouping” but that did remind of two more features I miss from chromium which I’ve added.
To me my CPU usage has definintly gone down after switching to waterfox. Edge kept crashing periodically for me.
BTW, do you use any other extensions besides Enhancer, Annotations Restored, SponsorBlock and DeArrow?
Enhancer and a downvote revealer. To @gigglybobble 's point below, I would argue Enhancer is part of Firefox at this point.
And while I do understand that’s not your experience, I assure you the issues do occur, and the overall weight and performance of Chrome and default Firefox is about the same. I still prefer Firefox, but I’m not gonna lie about the issues I’ve found for the sake of promoting it, either.
I’m pretty sure one of the multiple extensions I use to make Youtube watchable has a memory leak, because I do end up having to restart it periodically.
It’s an extension, so has nothing really to do with the browser. That’s on par with one star reviews on Amazon because the package was delivered damaged.
If you want to have choice in the future you should go with Firefox. Google is close to (or maybe already did) make Chrome equivalent of the Internet Explorer.
The better thing to what was with IE is that majority of websites still work fine in Firefox and people who stick to Chrome just do due to mostly ignorance.
