I specifically use Firefox because it's one of the last non-Chromium based browsers. Also Google is giving Firefox a bunch of money cause they need to keep them around as a cop-out to keep U.S. Anti-Trust regulators from investigating Google's control of the browser market share.
@@sihamhamda47 that works from firefox for me. I am using it as I type this (it's in a different tab). I use gmail web portal, and all the tools can be found there, and they work)
There is a project in Linux to make a new browser from scratch, called Ladybug. But in any case, Chromium is fine and that's why everyone, even the privacy obsessed browsers like Brave use it
@@TheRealFallingFistI personally am glad a from scratch FOSS browser is being built, just hope it or any other Foss browser can one day gain enough traction to overtake some of the other ones
Sometimes I wish that firefox (and thunderbird) were run more like a traditional open source project where the community had a really big say in things.
@@ivolol I stopped using Firefox a couple years ago, maybe more. But I still use Thunderbird. Had been using Mozilla for over two decades, since the Mozilla Suite, later Seamonkey. Long, long, long time ago.
I don't think anyone left Firefox for ideological reasons. If people hated Google so much they would not have abandoned Forefox for Google Chrome. Google just made a faster slicker browser and Firefox keeps finding ways to be slow after they do a new faster than ever revamp.
As someone who has stuck with Firefox for more than a decade now (it started because FF was less resource hoggy which worked for my slower computers), and I can't really imagine changing. Thanks for exposing Mozilla though, this will just make me take steps to ensure my own privacy instead of counting on the browser to do it for me.
I'm curious. Why is changing browsers not an option for you? I used to be a Firefox aficionado back when they led the way in browser extensions. Now, I don't think there's a single aspect of FF that other browsers aren't better at. This past year I've tried out nearly every browser available, apart from those by the very smallest companies. Currently I'm trialling Vivaldi which, although loaded with options and customizability, is fast and resource-light. Only detraction is the lack of an iOS browser, but that's due for release soon. If you're dead-set on staying with the FF architecture, perhaps give LibreWolf a test. Essentially, it's a custom version of Firefox that is actually committed to privacy and security.
@@ScramTek you can harden FireFox yourself if you learn how, in that way you can still customize it to your liking. However I advocate for using multiple browsers for different tasks. FireFox is still my primary browser for general browsing, I don't run into any performance issues with it. I don't know why people are so hung up on browser performance, I haven't really noticed a difference and I use multiple different browsers, from Chromium, Chrome, Brave to FireFox, LibreWolf and even SeaMonkey.
@@ScramTek well after this video I want to switch to brave, hope they arent scummy, tho nothing is free, you are the product, so who knows how brave makes money. But even if I want I cant switch straight away, I use my toolbar kinda like a bookmark, aka I have hundreds upon hindreds of tabs open, because I always have some stuff I want to get back to later that I dont want to forged but dont wanna deal with now, or videos on yt I want to watch but not now, so I ended up accumulating over a year hundreds of tabs open. I dont want to lose all of that, I know its unlikely ill ever go through all the tabs, but I dont want to lose all that, so until I somehow do all the things and watch all the things I kept open I cant switch :)
@@DanT-dh8lz Reading how you use browser tabs, I actually physically recoiled from the screen! 🤣 Each to their own, but that seems insanely unmanageable. Also, with FF being a resource hog, do you not experience huge lag when opening FF or multi-tasking?
The two primary reasons I still use Firefox are because I'm extremely distrustful of Google and as a result anything Chromium-based is suspect. Also, the ad blocking in Firefox is likely going to stay effective longer than anything Chromium-based. Yes, it's absolutely not perfect but I do take privacy measures that go beyond the stock setup.
As a huge firefox fan and supporter I'm gonna say that: isn't chromium open source? All chromium based alternatives like vivaldi or brave can just prune out whatever bullshit google has put in - still, having chromium as the ONLY browser engine sets a bad precedent
@@xFluing open source doesn't mean its not literal spyware. have you actually looked @ the source code for chromium? the amount of calls home is far beyond what even a web browser would ever need. Also keep in mind that firefox honestly is only just a little bit better :/
@@jetstreamsam-296In 2022 people got so outraged because google said they would remove sync from chromuim (which is a cloud-based service) so google backed out and chromium still has sync. Just don't use sync maybe. Also they're legally required to tell you everything they do with the data so maybe just read that document instead of THE ENTIRE SOURCE CODE? It sounds like you're getting all your info from biased sources. I've never understood why people hate Google so much (aside from youtube, but that's independantly managed so i don't blame their decisions entirely on google).
I'm really disappointed in Mozilla for the reasons described in this video. But I still use hardened Firefox because I just don't see any better alternatives. I would rather not use a chromium based browser.
Ungoogled chromium is among the best you can pick right now, though at a convenience cost and I doubt it will prove very useful if the framework changes push through.
The most important reason that Firefox needs to thrive is because it is the only alternative to Chromium, which is every other browser. If Firefox goes, Chromium will be everything, there will be a 100% monopoly, no competition.
I use Firefox. I started using it because Opera got rid of their best features like tab stacking and their email client, and switched to chromium. I continue to use Firefox because I do not wish for an internet where Google controls the entire presentation layer. I am okay with Firefox because they provide me the tools to turn off the bullshit, and make it a better experience for myself.
@@travis5732 Yeah Opera is pretty much compromised. Opera also bought Gamemaker and the way they're starting to treat the devs who use it is really sketchy.
@@EricMurphyxyzthey've already stated that they will continue supporting WebRequest and other features that allow content blocking even after manifest v3 changes unlike chrome, sure whether they will continue to do so 4 years after google drops it is difficult to say, but considering they're going through all the effort of making their own implementation I doubt they will just conform to chrome.
Up until about 5 years ago, FireFox had a neat feature where you could right-click a bookmark and one of the options was a text-box in which you could enter descriptions (which must've taken up an imperceptible amount of code). People were using this box to store their user-names and password hints so it could be brought up when using that bookmark. FireFox said they removed it because their telemetry said few people were using this feature. In reality, people using these text-boxes tended to be power-users who also blocked telemetry. 😖
@@Dwarg91 Mozilla saying that they removed it because telemetry reported little usage was pure B.S. (In other words, they're saying "You turning off telemetry mislead us into turning off useful features, so it's YOUR fault!") The text-box was *already being auto-populated by each website by default* when the bookmark was made. But since it wasn't over-written during subsequent visits, it was unique and very useful for those of us who knew how to take advantage of it.
@@Dwarg91 they can't make decisions based sorely on the lack of data. Besides, allowing extensive telemetry would defeat the entire "privacy first" premise.
I use firefox because google keeps threatening to break ad blocking plugins, and the fact they think its okay to say it at all makes it clear its not a place to stay, so a change had to be made. That leaves firefox as the next best option. Many of my IT friends did it for the same reason, at the same timeframe. It's not better, it's just not claiming its going to get worse. This is just where we are in the browser space now, sadly. Can't honestly say I have ever seen a website not work on firefox though, wtf web devs lol
I'm a firefox user and I strip many of these features and change the settings. I can completely understand why some people leave Firefox for privacy reasons, but moving towards Chrome for that doesn't make sense. Moving to a more obscure privacy focused browser would make more sense. At the moment I'll happily move to a forked Firefox browser where I can still use the same extensions.
I think a lot of the Firefox decline is due to more people acquiring computers. As non-tech people acquire computers, they use whatever other people give them and don't look much further. They use their computers as appliances for accessing Facebook or TH-cam. They don't know what their browser is. I've heard, in person, someone say "my circle is gone". They deleted their link to Chrome on their Windows 11 desktop. There is also the increase in the use of Chromebooks. These use Chrome. That means a huge chunk of the education market uses Chrome. If the market increases and the number of users stays the same, Firefox will see its market share decline. The decrease in users can be partly described by people jumping ship. I know people who moved to Edge. I know people who moved to Chrome. There are also a lot of people who moved to alternatives like Vivaldi and Librewolf. There are so many confounding variables.
I know, it's not just one variable that explains Firefox's downfall. But in this video I wanted to show that a lot of the blame still rests on Mozilla's shoulders.
@@EricMurphyxyz Yes. That's likely very true. But, it would do us all well to remember what killed Netscape if we want to know why they are currently in decline. There's also the TH-camr factor. A lot of the more privacy-conscious TH-camrs have been pushing people away from Mozilla. But, really, who wants pocket? I have it disabled in my NixOS config.
They’re killing off web features. That’s what’s pissing me off as a web developer. Mozilla and Apple are having a cock fight on who can become the next IE11.
@@SakugaAsu I wish you could turn on the flashlight while taking a picture. I know it has flash but how the hell do i see what im taking a picture of before i snap it?
Yeah, Librewolf is a fork of Firefox without Mozilla's crap Only downside is, their support is limited, only support AMD64 architecture, not ARM64 and i really wished I could use it on my Raspberry Pi
@@D.von.NIf Google gets rid of adblockers or lobbies them to be removed, it might actually be considered monopolistic behavior since you’re forcing everyone away from adblockers that actually block a lot of harmful malware. If Google does nothing to protect anybody’s personal information, they could be hit with either a lawsuit or cease and desist note, meaning a lawsuit from somebody who has had their data leaked, or a cease and desist note from the U.S. Government.
There's another huge factor Eric Murphy completely misses as to why Mozilla's Firefox is failing - Brave. Mozilla ran their founder out of the company on fake accusations of the usual, racism, misogamy and the like, then that new CEO who's paying herself more and more money while dancing on the grave of Mozilla. The founder when and founded a new privacy focused browser, Brave, as a fork of the popular Chrome browser, so when you use Brave, you basically get Chrome but without Google's tracking and spyware junk. If you were to have added Brave's market share into the mix, I suspect you'd see Brave's market share growing as Mozilla's shrinks. Also not mentioned specifically, but which was a huge factor in me leaving Firefox for Brave was that Firefox changed their whole UI from being it's own thing to being just a cheap imitation of Chrome. I'm not a fan of the Chrome UI, though I have gotten used to it and tolerate it in Brave, I really liked the classic Firefox UI, and found it WAT MORE user friendly then this jam everything into one cryptic place so you can't figure out where anything is as there's no logical groupings anymore crap that these "experts" SAY is EASIER on the user.
Two reasons why I still use it: - it puts Meta sites into their own corner/compartment so they don't creep into other tabs - Style Editor in the dev tools which is not in other browsers
funny enough, i use firefox specifically to run old flash files into a browser. An old version of firefox. Brave browser is what i'm stuck with at the moment.
@@guanciottaman checked just now-it doesn't. Firefox has an entire Style Editor (same group where you'd find Console, Network, etc) tab where you can go ham with adding and testing CSS.
LibreWolf gang rise up But speaking of Firefox itself, I use it because it's the second largest browser that isn't chromium-based. We need to keep google from monopolizing the web. Recently I got my grandparents to switch to Firefox (in the process of making them switch from windows to GNU/Linux aswell), doing my best to help.
I started using Librewolf on my Debian laptop recently and it's been nice. It's kind of like Tor, but without the ability to connect to onion sites and auto-VPN connection. I highly recommend getting a decent VPN to pair with LibreWolf for a much better privacy experience.
@@Name_cannot_be_blank I like Firefox and use it on every device, but you can't deny its flaws. The video playback performance is worse, by a lot. A video (4k/60fps) and very high bitrate brings my work laptop to a crawl under firefox. Chrome handles it with 0 issues.
@@Name_cannot_be_blank Just so you know, I am not a hardcore Arch elitist. I use Linux Mint as my OS and I mainly say GNU/Linux out of irony, to make fun of those elitists.
Basically what’s happening is Google keeping poor Firefox half-alive through Mozilla, so that they don’t have a monopoly but they don’t have competition either.
A big reason Firefox lost market share is because of the proliferation of Android, iOS, and "Chrome" devices that predominately use the default browser. PC users don't want to admit it, but they're not the king of the hill anymore when it comes to userbase. For most of the world, mobile devices aren't just their daily driver, it's their only means of getting online.
Exactly! Even Microsoft tried to make their UI look and act more like an overgrown cell phone, but the PC userbase was still large enough that their complaints were cared about. If MS did that today, there wouldn't be nearly the same level of pushback. Heck, I have friends and family that don't even have a PC anymore, when years ago, they ALL had a PC.
@@dillonandon And losing the desktop audience to Google Chrome - not to MS IE and MS Edge, which come pre-installed on (roughly) 75% of desktop machines. Or Safari (pre-installed on (roughly) 20% of desktop machines). Chrome comes pre-installed on about 3% of all desktop machines, Firefox comes pre-installed on most Linux desktop machines (about 3% market share in the desktop market). Thanks to rounding, the numbers do not add up to 100%, I know. It's just to give some ballpark figures. I guess the main sell point for Firefox was always that it was "anti-Microsoft". So an other browser entering the "not-Microsoft" market share hit them hard..
I remember when Mozilla added Auto-JavaScript execution by default in PDF files within the browser. So much about "privacy & security"... was one of the moments where I really noticed that they are going downhill with bad decisions.
What speed are you missing by using firefox? If there is a difference? it must be miliseconds because I don't notice any issues with the speed of Firefox. Why did you say you can't log in with your google account and sync firefox across all your devices? That's UNTRUE, it absolutely syncs across devices, seamlessly. What webites have you used that dont support Firefox? 20 years now and I haven't had that issue.
The only difference an uninformed user would notice is a different UI and different extensions. You get used to the layout, and all the big extensions have a Firefox version. Almost every chrome feature is also available on FF, and it's not like they work worse or anything.
I agree. I'm one of the minority that has Gecko browsers actually work faster for me. I've also only ever had one site break in Firefox, ironically after I loaded into it on Brave and put the link back into Librewolf it magically worked lol. I also don't get how strict tracker blocking breaks sites as it's never happened to me, it's only ever been my strict LW or uBO settings that have broken websites, never Firefox's tracker blocking.
it''s heartbreaking to watch this video being a firefox user since version 3.5, but you are correct in the fact that the only people who care about firefox nowadays are the loyal fans, even though it's not same anymore i still refuse to use any chromium based browser
I’ve used Google Chrome for several years, only really remember using Firefox or internet explorer like 10-12 years ago at the computer labs. About several months ago, I was just sick of Google and downloaded Firefox. I’m not tech savvy or crazy about anything, but that with uBlock and user agent switcher is golden. Can say now, am loyal to Firefox
I use and continue to use Firefox as my primary browser but I'm worried that it may actually fade into insignificance until the word "Firefox" doesn't ring a bell anymore for most people.
I would also love to see Firefox become better again. The only reason for me, to still use it is the privacy add-ons. I've got a lot them installed and there is no other browser, I can get such an effective setup with. - Every website containerized - AdBlock - Tracking Blocker - Very strict cookie policy, with everything removed, when leaving a website, or closing a tab - Canvas hash scrambled - Changing user agent on every new call Sadly, my Firefox for Android lacks two vital add-ons and I somewhat lost hope, they will come, or come back - No Cookie Auto delete - No Containers Untill Mozilla changed the mobile Firefox, I could use almost every Add-on from the desktop version. Now there are just the few specific ones.
Best you can do right now short of userscripts for firefox, but at the end of the day if firefox goes down the drain then librewolf doesn't have the resources to truly fork off and pull it back up.
I remember when Firefox was the new upstart that was eating the Mozilla browser’s lunch. It grew, was adopted, and finally became the same unresponsive thing it was forked to replace.
You and me both. Except, laughably, it got bigger than the old browser while doing a lot less. No composer, no mail, and what was the other feature? IRC?
To me the existence of Firefox with its own engine is crucial. I tend to agree with a lot of the things you mention in the video. I am not too concerned with the lower performance in benchmarks in Firefox. In real-life situations I do not feel the performance gap, and most tools today tend to be run in a browser. I feel (this is very much subjective) that the performance of Firefox is adequate, improvements are welcome, but it works as is. I actually think that the developer tools in Firefox are superior to those in Chrome. Then again I am not a web developer, I work with software development, and has done so for 20 years, but I have mostly managed to stay out of web development, so obviously my views are not those of a professional web developer. Chromium or rather Blink is a really good engine, don't get me wrong. The problem is that it is holding the major share of the browser market. With only really Mozillas Gecko (or I guess it's Quantum now) as an alternative. Some will say that having only one engine is a good thing as it creates a more uniform web. As someone who clearly remembers the time of Internet Explorer dominance I heavily disagree. One engine to rule them all is not something to desire. First and foremost last time we had one engine to rule them all, we were hit by stale innovation, and questionable design decisions. And while Blink might be open source, in practice it is being pushed by large corporations, who are serving their own interest rather than that of consumer. In general innovation is good, for instance Mozillas choice to switch to Rust, is something that has potential to increase stability of the browser. If all engines are based on the same base, then the possibility space for innovation is decreased. One other problem with Blink is the list of companies supporting it, Mozilla might not have made the best decisions, and might have a moral issue with regards to their actions. But it is nothing against the list of companies supporting Blink: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta, just to mention a few. Compared to those Mozilla is small company. And sure there might be smaller companies creating alternative browsers, but they are almost always based on Blink. Do we really think that they have any actual impact on the features that the big companies put into the engine? More importantly do we really think than any of the big companies would allow any contributions to the engine, that would harm their income sources. So for companies who live on personal data, it is unlikely that features limiting personal data exposure will make it into the engine. One example of the above can be found here: www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23131029/mozilla-ad-blocking-firefox-google-chrome-privacy-manifest-v3-web-request The blink engines decision to switch to manifest version 3, will remove many of the most efficient ad blockers. Who defended version 2 and ad-blocker support? Mozilla. So for all the issues they have, they still remain one of the strongest proponents of privacy, at least that can offer a viable alternative to Blink/Chromium based browsers. So I do not trust Mozilla, but given the choice between Mozilla and the usual suspects: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta I will choose Mozilla every day. One last thought, given that Blink and the companies behind it has more than 95% market share, why do we need to visit a Mozilla page for the best web development reference: developer.mozilla.org I think people tend to forget the huge contributions to the modern web that Mozilla has been behind. So I agree that Mozilla has made questionable decisions, I am not concerned about changes to the browser, I am concerned about addition of services such as Pocket that harms privacy. They should have made it as an extension instead. But the alternative is in my opinion worse. I have been looking for good forks of the Gecko/Quantum engine, but so far I have not found a proper one. Tor is a special case and in my opinion not a general browser, but a specialist tool for special use cases.
>I have been looking for good forks of the Gecko/Quantum engine, but so far I have not found a proper one. Tor is a special case and in my opinion not a general browser, but a specialist tool for special use cases. What do you think of LibreWolf or IceCat?
These are some good points but I have one small nitpick: Apple uses WebKit (which is a fork of KHTML) and Blink is a fork of WebKit. Apple had WebKit for a long time before Google got into the browser market and at this point they have diverged enough that they warrant separate testing when developing for the web.
@@cultist7931 IceCat has as far as I know not been updated for quite some time and is not really a usable alternative. LibreWolf was back when I tried it promising but not yet stable, might be time for another go. Waterfox also proved to be a viable option, more polished than LibreWolf, but LibreWolf had better privacy defaults.
You've missed a big point: even if Mozilla didn't care about privacy at all, that would still be miles better than alphabet being actively hellbent at sniping every last bit of privacy.
I was using Firefox since the version 2.0. I finally gave up on them a few months ago. Imposing the proton update with the huge top after so many people expressed their disagreement was a big FU to the users. Customization was one of the huge force of Firefox. I tried Brave and never looked back.
@@Gamerappa except it is still updated. :/ It got a lot of Defense in Depth updates that eventually became severe CVEs on Firefox that Pale Moon had fixed years back. It's likely more secure than Firefox these days...
All of this is pretty damning, but having worked in multiple fields of IT for various organizations, I think its simply integration and lack of user awareness that's bringing Firefox's numbers down. Organizations typically use one of two systems and that's Google's Workspace/G Suite, or Microsoft's 365 environment and both of those pair with their respective browsers of Chrome and Edge (which of course is Chromium based). The education sector skews these numbers as well, especially in the US. Student devices are Chromebooks and their accounts are through Google. Even if the teachers have Windows devices they also typically have Google accounts using Google services (I.E Classroom) to integrate with their students better and this is all predominantly done through Chrome which is often pre-installed on faculty devices anyways. This argument can be even further enforced by looking at the next browser down the list from Chrome, and that is Safari with ~25% market share in browsers. Considering that Safari isn't even available outside of Apple devices that rules out user preference especially since Windows devices still hold by and large majority market share for desktop computers. Safari's numbers are coming purely from people using iPhones, iPads (which make up 20%-22% of mobile device market share) and Mac computers. Though of course Edge is also one of the least used (although still more used that Firefox lol) and that's because most people just use Google for services like email, TH-cam, Docs, Sheets, etc... So of course the first time they go to sign into Google on a new device they get that nice "install Chrome now" pop up, and they know that the browser they download will instantly sync to their old one so they don't have to re-learn anything. It's just convenience. I'll also add that personally I've worked with enough end-users over the years to know that they don't care about their privacy until something violates it right in their face. Most of them could care less about trackers and user data until you point it out to them and even then they'll take the convenience of that over privacy as soon as it annoys them. It's why DuckDuckGo has such low market share in search engines. I use DDG every day, but if you're the kind of user that's used to getting your desired link in the first 3 search results the DDG isn't for you because you have to dig a little deeper than that most of the time.
@@lesath7883 I seem to recall that Netscape killed Netscape by being endlessly "beta" with runaway feature creep, speaking as someone who installed it and uninstalled it shortly after. Microsoft just hammered some nails into the coffin with IE.
yeah DDG gives bad results sometimes, but it can also just give results not listed in google. my favorite feature is the bangs, so that I can quickly query google if I really need to
Not private by default, but it is one of the few browsers you can make as private as you want, and be free from the chains of Chromium. That's why I'm staying till the bitter end.
One thing that has been bothering me about Firefox in recent years is when they constantly take away Customization Options, as weell as making many changes to Force users to having Tabs above the Address bar, like every other modern browser. However, that5 does make it harder for me to move the Entire Window between my two screens, since I would sometimes accidently grab and move only a single a Tab. I also prefer the old wqay where the Tab is attached to the actual browsing section.
"Tabs above the Address bar " is reason I refuse to upgrade my Firefox. I was furious when I upgraded and they change's that. I tried few scripts and it works fine but no upgrade never again. I don't really care about safety (I use computer Firefox rarelt for normal browsing, if they want to know I search for coloring pages for my children, go ahead, lol) do I don't need newest version. I just want browser that works and don't changes
Alternative method to switch windows between screens is using hotkeys. On Windows it's WIN+Shift+Cursor Left/Right, on Linux it can be customized similarly. I find it much easier and faster than dragging with the mouse. I mostly use windows maximized, too.
When I used Windows (2019-2022), Firefox was the only browser I actually liked. I tried Edge, and I gave it many opportunities, and it worked great. But I was just very satisfied with with Firefox’s performance and customization. I started using Firefox only because of the Privacy features, but I genuinely grew to like it and rely on it. Even when I tried other browsers, I kept on coming back to Firefox. Unfortunately there are websites that don’t work well, but that was just not enough for me to change it as the default.
Yep! There are a few specific reasons I keep using it despite dubious privacy issues: - I like the customizable layout. - I like the easy-to-understand settings that don't try to obfuscate privacy settings for the sake of "ease of use." - I like the extensive library of privacy extensions. - I like not needing to have EVERY LAYER of my internet experience logged into one account/online-identity. I don't even have a Firefox Account. - I LOVE the Multi-Accounts Container sandboxing extension! It allows me not only to log into the same site multiple times, but also to prevent one website from accessing the cookies of EVERY OTHER SITE I currently have open in the browser. For example, I have a dedicated container that only allows me to access or connect to Facebook if I'm in the *facebook* container, disallowing tracking cookies from all other sites.
I never understood where the "website doesn't work on ff" came from. I only ever had some sites not working on old Opera back when they still had their own engine. Never with FF.
For me it never was the privacy that enticed me. It was because Firefox is the only browser that's not based in Chromium. I don't remember what was the deal with that, but I guess that involves something like "If chromium fails, every other browser fails"
Same, I switched back to Firefox a few years ago not for privacy. But because of how chrome would use a lot of my laptop's ram. Even though now I have a better laptop, I still stick with Firefox because I find it better than chromium based browsers. I'd only use chrome in places where I can't use Firefox, or if a webpage doesn't currently support Firefox.
The reasonI switched was because I don't want to give google a monopoly on browsers. There are already inetances where they prupose Stuff against the W3C because yeah, if do it, everbody else has to follow
Privacy is important, but to me, customization is even more important than that. That was one of the main things I loved about Firefox way back when. You could change and play around with so many things that the other browsers at the time simply wouldn't let you touch! Sadly, it seems like that is a thing of the past - even something as simple as disabling CORS without installing some shady extensions is easier done in Chrome than in Firefox. If someone came out with an alternative browser focused on having as many features as possible for power users, then I'd switch to that in a heartbeat.
Try out Arc, their fork of chromium is completely ungoogled. The customisation is mind boggling. It’s actually the best browser I’ve tried. More performant than chrome itself too.
I have try vivaldi for some month and it have the most parameters i've seen in a software. The thing i liked the most was the tab stacking as i keep every tab i left in the last session (i should really clean that mess sometimes). I don't remember why but I switched back to firefox.
Absolutely underrated comment. Customization is what makes the thing and sadly, the move to Quantum was a big slap in the face, but it's stilly by far the best. Also: If it doesn't have about:config, it's not a browser.
Yeah, it is the main reason I am "vendor locked" to Firefox. I think it is still far ahead of other browsers when it comes to customizability as most of them relied too much on chromium. I still have the Photon compact UI with the Lepton chrome CSS, but they are also backing on that end with the addition of the unified extension icon, you can no longer put extension icons in the overflow menu. It is also used as the base for 3 privacy based projects, Tor Browser, Arkenfox, and Librewolf, which the last is what I am using. I think I tried Opera and Edge as some people claim they have good customizability, but it didn't take long for me to turn away. Don't think I have tried Vivaldi though. The closest I have tried is surprisingly KDE Falkon, which uses QtWebEngine which in turn depends on Google's Blink engine, but it is a lightweight browser and without all the crucial plugins I need.
All good points. I still use hardened Firefox because it's pretty much the only decent open source alternative, but it's a shame to have to go through many hoops to configure the browser to be privacy-respecting.
The thing that made me first switch to Firefox was that Chrome was having frequent memory leak issues, which never happened to me with Firefox. I started hardening a little bit past that point, but I don't get what people mean by Chrome being faster.
I don't notice any difference in performance between Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Actually, Firefox uses less RAM. I mostly use Edge but I switch between the others sometimes for some specific uses.
Firefox CONSTANTLY gets improved and is FAR MORE desirable than all other browsers. Firefox won't tie up computer resources unnecessarily, and isn't a lead brick like Chrome is, which also spies on you, just like internet explorer also spies on you. Chromium isn't much different. Brave browser is also very nice, but it may be just a bit too simplistic.
I always like to say that librewolf is what firefox was supposed to be, actually private with sensible defaults and great fingerprinting protection out of the box, not chromium based (actually it uses the same browser engine as firefox) and yk the people behind it actually listen to and care about their community. That is why I converted from firefox to librewolf.
I now mainly use Firefox but still keep brave around in case a site doesn’t work properly. I’m hoping that the ladybird browser eventually gets good enough for daily use, it would be really cool to have another non-chromium based mainstream browser.
What I hugely respect Mozilla for are their MDN web docs. The go to please to learn about developing the web, web APIs and more. They really did a great job with these docs.
Um, this is just wrong, you can just sign in a synch across devices, in a new device, when signing in, you not only get access to your bookmarks, but everything, extensions and even some extension settings get installed, your history, browser preferences and themes. And you can seamlessly switch between all devices and send tabs between devices. I'm disregarding this whole video as biased or poorly reaserched just from that one lie
I had been using Firefox for 15 years or so. Every new update I was dreading the UI being messed up and wondering which features would get axed. Asking on their ticketing system to add back features that had been supported for years was met with dismissive replies from the maintainers. Eventually I realized that switching to a different browser would be easier than to stick with Firefox...
@@mrkosmos9421 I mean, it's been going on for years. The most recent thing was when they removed browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll (which gives you the ability to siable selecting the whole url when clicking on the url bar). Once it was clear they wouldn't add it back, I did make my own fork but after a while I just couldn't be bothered with it any more. After that I still used FF for a while but the constant UI changes eventually tired me out.
@@mrkosmos9421 For example: The simple feature to have the tab bar below your address bar. Yes it's very basic but thats why it's even more baffling why such simple customisation options get removed.
As a longtime Firefox user, I've never had a huge problem with it but they don't seem to do anything interesting or different - that's from a UI and usability standpoint. All this that you talked about regarding privacy is really troubling. I recently switched to Vivaldi, and while yes it has the same base code as Chrome, they put a LOT of extra effort into both the UI and privacy. There's an interview with the Vivaldi CEO on Techlore's channel - definitely worth a watch, and it's what helped make my mind up to switch. People like DT say it's "proprietary garbage," but Vivaldi is very open about their stances on privacy and putting users first, and AFAIK all the code is reviewable even if you can't re-use it.
Yes I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi too. For me it were mainly the UI changes coming with Firefox 89. I still don't understand it but the changelog said something like »Most of users activity is in the top bar so we removed most of the buttons to make it easier«
I understand the reason they didn't fully open source their project, but they can promise however they want, it won't make them more trustworthy: Google does to it, while it completely steals every bit of information from its users. So I'd always prefer a fork of Firefox than a proprietary Vivaldi. OR, they need to release a fully open source, even if it means it's not as pretty as their proprietary blob. That would be their best try at gaining users by earning trust.
That's why I use... Brave ! It's what Firefox was, but actually is. Plus, it's open source. And it's based on Chromium (Chrome's base) so it's convenient, fast and easy to use. It's also compatible with lots of websites, but since websites actually only allows Edge and Chrome, Brave often gets blocked for no reason at all because with some extensions you can make the site thinks you're on Chrome without losing any performance or anything compared to Chrome.
I have used Firefox for a really long time, especially because it allows me to navigate through my tabs, while Chrome and Edge keep shrinking them and eventually stop showing them. Yes, I know I have issues. Eventually, the privacy, adblock and containers stuff kept me into it, but with this information I might just switch to a fork before it starts being awful... but after I save all the tabs I have open
One thing I think made Firefox lose marketshare was that Quantum, while being a massive and 100% needed improvement to the browser, was too little too late for people, and every change they've made since has been completely braindead in my opinion.
They should have done it in 2014/15 rather then 2017 because at this point i noticed that the Browser began to slow down compered to others. However still enjoing Firefox to this day
I use Firefox and the reasons as to why I do so are complicated: - It's not chromium-based - At least you could do Hardening if things get dire - It's preferred by Linux users (although i'm not one) - I used to use Chrome but I switched to Firefox out of fear when I realised Chrome was acting a bit weird once - I figured that if Chrome starts being all 1984 and bans ad-blockers I could take refuge in Firefox perhaps (unless they give in to Google). - Using it feels unironically unique from the others who use Chrome or Edge (a stupid reason, i know) - Another stupid reason but, I like foxes in general, including an anime kitsune called Senko and the character Firefox-chan by Merryweather :) Don't get me wrong, I know that the browser is far from private, however some reasons why I use it are sentimental (not very logical), and also because I've kind of given up on trying other browsers. As you said, the thing that makes me salty is that apart from anti-privacy bloatware such as Pocket, some things don't work on Firefox but obviously work better in chromium-based browsers, such as certain browser extensions and websites sometimes (every now and then stuff is buggy in Firefox, like google sign-in pages saying "Something went wrong", but when I try another browser it works fine). In addition there's a social issue: when someone came across me using Firefox once they looked down on me asking me why I still use it in this day and age (and I don't blame him since I have weird reasons, but still it hurt).
I switched back to Firefox a few years ago. That reason being Chrome using up my memory, even if I have a couple tabs open. As for privacy, well I honestly think it's almost impossible to have privacy on the internet.
Switching to Firefox with some mods from github is the best decision ive made. Since it is open source, there are many mods you can add. More privacy, more snapiness, etc. Im loving it so far
The average user doesn't care about privacy. Firefox became popular because after IE 6 Microsoft dropped the browser ball by not deciding not to release any new IE versions independently of new Windows releases. When Longhorn/Vista got stuck in development hell there was no new version of IE for Windows XP in development so IE 6 just stagnated for years. That is when Firefox seized its opportunity. MS eventually released IE 7 which began a long and slow process of clawing back relevance in the desktop browser space for MS. Chrome then came into the scene as well as the increasing popularity of OSX with Safari. Then the mobile revolution happened...Chrome became the default on Android and Safari on iOS. Finally, Edge is essentially fine on Windows now.
I've always used firefox and it's not that much slower in comparison to chrome or chromium based browsers, nor are there many pages that don't work on firefox. I didn't know the privacy part though, thanks for the video
Having Google as the default search engine is honestly good, because then Google pays their competitor for something users can easily change. However, the other Google tracking that Mozilla allows makes this a difficult argument to make. Mozilla doesn’t even use their own location services by default; you have to change it away from Google manually in the about config.
Bad in the long term though. 1.) As Eric pointed out, the main thing with Firefox is supposed to be privacy, but if the default search engine and so many of their other practices betray this, then many people will not see the point in using it over Chrome or one of the Chromium derivatives. 2.) Making Google the default gets more people used to using Google services and makes it much easier for that person to switch over. And on a side note, Mozilla's choice to look and behave closer to Chrome might have been done to make it seem easier for Chrome users to switch, but also makes it easier for Firefox users to switch to Chrome.
I'm suddenly thankful I've never had a real reason to use location services on the desktop. Not that they work on the occasions I've tried them -- Nottingham is not even the nearest city. :)
@@AlbedoAtoned You just get back to my point. No one needs to use the default; it can be changed. Where it becomes problematic is when there are over a hundred non-private defaults. I’ve changed nearly 200 things in my about config. The sketchiest part about it is that my hardened Firefox is most likely unique, which means it probably won’t blend in with anything. I still learned a lot doing it, though, and I’ve shored some really obvious problems with Firefox’s default configuration, but I can’t possibly recommend it for real privacy.
@@OcteractSG The problem is that most people aren't going to change defaults. They will stick with the vanillla set up almost every time, which is why so many people push for Brave since it comes with an adblocker, despite Ublock Origin being easily available for pretty much every browser out there. Which means they are far less likely to want to edit config files manually, even if they are provided pre-configured ones to use. The results speak for themselves. Firefox has continued to lose more and more users to Chrome. Which is why I don't recommend Firefox itself, but one of it's forks like Waterfox or LibreWolf. Unlike Firefox, these aren't likely to push people away as much every update.
I've been using Linux since the start (1994) and exclusively since 2006. Never used Chrome in my life, just Firefox and Chromium. With GreaseMonkey and UBlock I can customize to never see anything I don't ever want to see. As a Linux user, I configure my own system to be hardened, and Firefox runs very fast for me, taking little RAM. You just need to know what you're doing.
Indeed it can be done the problem is it used to be quite easy to do and was viable for the avg user now however its largely beyond the capability of such and the asshats in charge at mozilla have actively worked against those of us that actually made firefox good
The blue logo behind the CEO of Mozilla (at 12:23) should tell you everything you need to know about the direction and trustworthiness of Mozilla Corporation.
Netscape was the first browser I ever used, the competition wasn't available on my OS of choice, and when Netscape fizzled out Firefox seemed to be the way to go. Firefox ticks all the boxes for me, it is stable, intuitive and nothing has ever happened to make me dislike it, so I see no reason to change.
Sometimes I wonder if it might be a good idea to make a new, privacy respecting browser from scratch. Problem is, it would likely end up with just a handful of part-time developers and end up in a similar situation to Pale Moon.
Best privacy based browser that's easy to get for the avg is brave However we need to keep mozilla alive since we cannot allow the web to become chromium based only
JavaScript is insanely stupid, you have mentally ill coercion rules, 28392 different test suites to abide by, don't even talk about JIT because the most one person can create is a tree-walk JS interpreter if you really want JavaScript support in that theoretical browser you would need to use either V8 or SpiderMonkey which are both huge monoliths that are difficult to compile
Such browser does exist - GNOME Web, it doesn't depend on Chromium or Firefox, instead it's built on WebKit like Safari and Chromium. It's very lightweight and works great, but many websites that don't have an idea that this browser exists may break. Which exposes the main problem - Chromium is so widespread, on many occasions web developers don't support anything except for in, de-facto current web standard is literally "it should work on Chromium", so creating and maintaining independent browsers is extremely hard
Yes, Chrome being advertised in the world's most used search engine is a reason to lose market share. But making a crummy browser doesn't help retaining users. I switched to Chrome when I tested that it actually used *less* memory than FF when opening multiple tabs.
Yeah, the memes about chrome hogging memory were made before FF Quantum, which made every tab its own process just like it is on chrome. The advantage is that one tab can't cause the entire browser to freeze or crash, but it does eat up way more memory.
I used to use Firefox back in the Windows XP days, but when I switched to Windows 7 I also switched over to Waterfox, which is a fork of Firefox that went 64-bit first, and I've stuck with it ever since then. Given Firefox's recent affair with Big Brother I'm glad I got out so long ago. The Waterfox team seems to largely be holding to the same principles that Mozilla used to, and to my knowledge have largely remained apolitical when it comes to things like censorship. The only real issue I've encountered with Waterfox so far is that it is based on an older version of Firefox, so certain websites may not let you login, although this can be circumvented with the right extension.
Google is paying them so they become a failed company. As long as the developers for firefox are being payed to be not private then the for profit business will have no reason to make their browser good when resenting any form of monetization they can get.
If only Microsoft would open source the Trident render engine and Opera open source the Presto render engine, we might be able to have more choice. I remember at one time way back where if you had Opera, IE and either Netscape Navigator or Firefox installed, in Opera you could select which render engine you wanted to use on a web page. Something like that needs to come back. There's also Ungoogled-Chromium, LibreWolf and Midori. There are options, but people like to have expandability too, which is yet another hole that oozes your privacy data. So a lot of the mess is really the user's fault for going with what the big browsers say is good for them and not doing a little bit of digging to see what they are all about behind the scenes, like presented in this video.
No kidding those were discontinued. That is why I said they should be open sourced so some actual competent people could optimize them for modern web use. The whole path of Blink began as KDE's KHTML, then crApple stole^H^H^H^H^H forked it to become WebKit for Safari, then the KDE community threw hands to make crApple open their source, then Google says they didn't want to be under crApple's thumb and forked it to what we now have as Blink. The main point I was making is that there is not enough choice when it comes to web browser render engines.
@@kreuner11 i think what he's refering is, that instead of leaving to die the engines, the corporations should have instead opted to making them open source
Good video, but now that TH-cam has lost the anti-adblock war, and Google gets ready for the Chrome-apocalypse (Manifest V3), Firefox is becoming incredibly relevant again. For anyone that still wants to use an as blocker, at least.
This is a great and informative video and I agree with almost everything you said. One thing worth mentioning though is that Google Chrome is really f garbage as well. Saying that it's much faster than Firefox is really easy, if you only ever look at JavaScript benchmarks, but Chrome has become REALLY bloated and it lags a lot while scrolling, far more frequently than Firefox does and it's just inherently not very stable. For example Chrome (the Windows version) has to be reinstalled every now and again, hardreseting & deleting the cache rarely helps. Even fresh installs are not great, but the browser just steadily deteriorates over time. Firefox does not have this problem. I just wish someone forked Firefox & made a new foundation to do some real reinvigorating effort to pick up the fight. I'm totally okay with them following Brave's revenue scheme as well, or something similar. With the way Google is trying to enshittify the entire Internet itself, we need Firefox (or a new derivative) to pick up the slack more than ever before.
Someone In the comments here talked about something called LibreWolf which Is a fork from Firefox [Edit] Commenter Is highway_roadkill If you're curious who exactly commented It
I've heard a theory that, since Google is about to break ad blockers and make them nonfunctional, it's going to cause an exodus of people to other browsers, most likely to Firefox or Opera. (Opera does that have a minor scandal going on with that whole GX Aura thing, I imagine everyone is going to forget about it by next week.) The point is, the breaking of Ad blockers is probably what'll save Firefox.
Let’s get something straight comrades. There’s no such thing as privacy on the Internet. If someone or some company wants to know your shit, they’ll find out. don’t ever delude yourself into thinking otherwise just pick what user interface you like better and that’s that.
I still use Firefox, but I died a bit inside when their UI changed. I had to change the internal CSS myself to add visual separators between tabs. I hate how everything looks like it was made by Apple now. I hope this design trend goes away soon.
Apple's "design language" is just pure cancer... it spreads everywhere and you simply can't get rid of it because it keep popping up at three different places at the same time if you manage to remove it at one place.
It's a shame, really. I've been a staunch user of Firefox for years and for a while, I did use Chrome because of the features it had for web development some years ago that Firefox just did not have or that were buggy, I moved away from it because, well, Google. Firefox doing all this isn't all that surprising, but saddening indeed. If you want Firefox, but more privacy-based, use Tor or Librewolf. Both are good and have their pros and cons, but are far better than Firefox when it comes to privacy and security!
I still use Firefox, because it's one of the only browsers on Android that I trust which supports extensions (uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, the two most important ones for me) while still allowing me to sync data between the phone and the computer. Firefox is good, and honestly, speed-wise, it does actually seem faster than Chrome on my hardware. It also seems to handle some web applications I leave running in the background a bit better - Chrome is very aggressive at throttling back Javascript when a tab is backgrounded, which breaks those tools. Chrome does however support things like AV1 Encoding and HDR TH-cam on Windows, which Firefox lacks.
I stopped using Firefox primarily because I was constantly running into issues with it that nobody helped me resolve that were absent on Chrome. Same thing with Linux in general, I used to daily drive enthusiast distros like Gentoo or Arch, but I stopped doing so, because I have less and less time to tinker with systems and need my PC to just work and stay out of my way, whether I'm working or gaming. I still run Linux on my machine for work (though I run Ubuntu these days, because I don't have time for Arch or Gentoo anymore) and don't use Linux for anything else outside of work. Gaming on Linux is still subpar, modding games (which for me is crucial) is not possible on Linux, and even though I only ever use Linux for work, I constantly run into issues, bugs and annoyances that I need to spend my time searching online to fix. Windows for me just works and does almost everything I need to do and never runs into issues or tests my patience (except development is painful to do on Windows, because I already got used to developer workflow on Linux and it's just better in every way imaginable).
The only reason I use Firefox is because of the Manifest V3 debacle. It was a bit of work to migrate to another browser and I am just too lazy to switch again.
4:13 I don't agree that chrome is more convenient, Firefox has better bookmark system, easy to use screenshots. Also, when you have a big number of open tabs, in chrome they are all just squeezed, in firefox they are not and you can still partially see the names of the tabs
I was a Firefox user from around 2009 and had been getting fed up with it over the last few years. The final straw for me is a bug which causes the Android version on Pixel devices to randomly lock up which causes the device to restart, loosing all tabs in the process. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, it can happen once a week or several times a day, its completely unusable. The worst thing is its been a known problem for some time and many people have reported it, however apparently Mozilla claim its an issue with Pixel devices and not Firefox, even though it doesn't happen with any other browser. So they're basically unwilling to even try and fix it, guess they just lost one more long term user.
I mean if the device actually reboots, chances are it is actually a device/system issue, and not necessarily something easy to work around. Possibly even a sabotage from Google, because they did such things in the past...
Yeah. I had to remove Firefox on the 10 year old Android phone I have because it was causing the device to freeze or reboot (I forget). I was using LineageOS and had the latest version available for my phone (15.1) and no new version will ever be available for that device. Found GitHub issue (#14008) for mozilla-mobile and they said update your LineageOS. So everyone with an old phone that does not have an option to update cannot use Firefox. Mozilla could have easily fixed this, but they chose not to. No other browser that I can get on LineageOS has this problem, now I just use Chrome on it.
@@Ramotttholl I mostly agree, but there's a nerdy thing I want to point out: people who used windows for a long time surely familiar with "ie is a browser to download good browser" meme, they just download what they want and ditching ie/edge for good. they are aware that they have such option and care enough to do it. meanwhile due to how phones are designed in general in all aspects it's hard to do something meaningful on the phone except for consuming this endless content on internet, from this comes the fact that phone users are not really smart comparing to pc users in this regard, plus you can't mess around normally with OS like in windows, you don't have rights even on android, I personally tried to remove google crap from os and rom just bricked, even though I was able to do it back in old android 5 days. people around my age who used to phones having hard time to use the computer and I believe it's really concerning, I witnessed it myself when I was in college and it was IT section I was in by the way.
It was AMAZING until they decided "lets look like Chrome and shut down personalization and extensions"... they tried to "out-chrome chrome" and just pretend to be something else... and it SUCKED... Sadly though... we NEED FIREFOX today. We NEED IT. There's almost NO other browser that's NOT Chrome under the hood- Opera, Maxthon, Opera, Brave, Edge, etc... ALL OF THEM are Chrome.
I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox. After watching this video, I think I’ll just set Chrome back as the default browser. I guess Firefox is my secondary browser now…
Used to be a hardcore Fx user, before they overhauled the way they did extensions and basically killed off my most-beloved extension (Vimperator, although Vimperator also died simply due to a lack of development effort). (I also especially hated the "minimalist" UI that Fx converted to.) I tried a few Fx forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox) but they weren't really satisfactory, so I went Chromium (SRWare Iron, specifically) for a few years, before returning to Fx again. Been on it for a few years now, even on my smartphone, and if I need to use a Chromium/non-Firefox browser for some asinine reason, I use MS Edge.
I use Firefox. Privacy's not my main focus, although desirable, of course. I've been using it because it's more lightweight than Chrome. I've been considering switching to Brave and by now I think I've settled.
Firefox used to be the power user's browser, with feature sets other browsers didn't have. Now it just feels like Chrome, and if I'm basically going to be using Chrome, well... May as well use it. To their credit they did finally enhance their api to allow some of the most popular extensions to work again, but it took way too long. Any reasonable planner would have made an api capable of handling their most popular extensions a priority unless they had something similar built in, which they did not.
Yeah, I agree with you, Mozilla back then did all the right things when MS was literally destroying the web, then to see them making deals with Google or advertisers or announcing they now use telemetry on your searches, wow. There is no hope.
a lot of the excess stuff like Pocket is what drove me to swap to LibreWolf earlier this year and i can say it's a much better experience and is truly privacy-focused while still feeling like Firefox (obviously because it's a fork but still)
I specifically use Firefox because it's one of the last non-Chromium based browsers. Also Google is giving Firefox a bunch of money cause they need to keep them around as a cop-out to keep U.S. Anti-Trust regulators from investigating Google's control of the browser market share.
I think that's a good reason to use Firefox, but it's hard to convince people to use a browser only as a protest against a monopoly.
Same, I hate chrome
@@EricMurphyxyztrue. It needs to provide something better, to at least someone
I use it almost all the time, and only switch back to Chrome when I need Google Docs to do a collaborative task (group assignment) from my teacher
@@sihamhamda47 that works from firefox for me. I am using it as I type this (it's in a different tab). I use gmail web portal, and all the tools can be found there, and they work)
The saddest part is that if you want to abandon ship, THERE'S NO MORE SHIPS ON THE SEA.
There is a project in Linux to make a new browser from scratch, called Ladybug. But in any case, Chromium is fine and that's why everyone, even the privacy obsessed browsers like Brave use it
Ladybird browser! In development, completely from-scratch FOSS browser.
@@TheRealFallingFist nah, they will not have the money to build and will fall into oblivion of obscurity
@@TheRealFallingFistI personally am glad a from scratch FOSS browser is being built, just hope it or any other Foss browser can one day gain enough traction to overtake some of the other ones
tor
Sometimes I wish that firefox (and thunderbird) were run more like a traditional open source project where the community had a really big say in things.
all the big projects are corporate controlled
They are open-source and can be forked, if enough people wanted to take this on...
Maybe thunderbird actually dodged a bullet...
@@ivolol I stopped using Firefox a couple years ago, maybe more. But I still use Thunderbird.
Had been using Mozilla for over two decades, since the Mozilla Suite, later Seamonkey. Long, long, long time ago.
LibreWolf is the nearest you will get.
🦆 DuckDuckGo isn’t that innocent either.
I never used DuckDuckGo because I think it has a stupid name.
U should not use windows either for that reason
Or Apple
as I know they allowed Microsoft to track the user right?
@@xeridea Stupid name is a bad sign, good judgment
I don't think anyone left Firefox for ideological reasons. If people hated Google so much they would not have abandoned Forefox for Google Chrome. Google just made a faster slicker browser and Firefox keeps finding ways to be slow after they do a new faster than ever revamp.
As someone who has stuck with Firefox for more than a decade now (it started because FF was less resource hoggy which worked for my slower computers), and I can't really imagine changing. Thanks for exposing Mozilla though, this will just make me take steps to ensure my own privacy instead of counting on the browser to do it for me.
I'm curious. Why is changing browsers not an option for you? I used to be a Firefox aficionado back when they led the way in browser extensions. Now, I don't think there's a single aspect of FF that other browsers aren't better at. This past year I've tried out nearly every browser available, apart from those by the very smallest companies.
Currently I'm trialling Vivaldi which, although loaded with options and customizability, is fast and resource-light. Only detraction is the lack of an iOS browser, but that's due for release soon.
If you're dead-set on staying with the FF architecture, perhaps give LibreWolf a test. Essentially, it's a custom version of Firefox that is actually committed to privacy and security.
@@ScramTek you can harden FireFox yourself if you learn how, in that way you can still customize it to your liking. However I advocate for using multiple browsers for different tasks. FireFox is still my primary browser for general browsing, I don't run into any performance issues with it. I don't know why people are so hung up on browser performance, I haven't really noticed a difference and I use multiple different browsers, from Chromium, Chrome, Brave to FireFox, LibreWolf and even SeaMonkey.
every other browser has googles spyware in it.@@ScramTek
@@ScramTek well after this video I want to switch to brave, hope they arent scummy, tho nothing is free, you are the product, so who knows how brave makes money. But even if I want I cant switch straight away, I use my toolbar kinda like a bookmark, aka I have hundreds upon hindreds of tabs open, because I always have some stuff I want to get back to later that I dont want to forged but dont wanna deal with now, or videos on yt I want to watch but not now, so I ended up accumulating over a year hundreds of tabs open. I dont want to lose all of that, I know its unlikely ill ever go through all the tabs, but I dont want to lose all that, so until I somehow do all the things and watch all the things I kept open I cant switch :)
@@DanT-dh8lz
Reading how you use browser tabs, I actually physically recoiled from the screen! 🤣
Each to their own, but that seems insanely unmanageable. Also, with FF being a resource hog, do you not experience huge lag when opening FF or multi-tasking?
The two primary reasons I still use Firefox are because I'm extremely distrustful of Google and as a result anything Chromium-based is suspect. Also, the ad blocking in Firefox is likely going to stay effective longer than anything Chromium-based. Yes, it's absolutely not perfect but I do take privacy measures that go beyond the stock setup.
As a huge firefox fan and supporter I'm gonna say that: isn't chromium open source? All chromium based alternatives like vivaldi or brave can just prune out whatever bullshit google has put in - still, having chromium as the ONLY browser engine sets a bad precedent
@@xFluing open source doesn't mean its not literal spyware. have you actually looked @ the source code for chromium? the amount of calls home is far beyond what even a web browser would ever need. Also keep in mind that firefox honestly is only just a little bit better :/
@@jetstreamsam-296In 2022 people got so outraged because google said they would remove sync from chromuim (which is a cloud-based service) so google backed out and chromium still has sync. Just don't use sync maybe. Also they're legally required to tell you everything they do with the data so maybe just read that document instead of THE ENTIRE SOURCE CODE? It sounds like you're getting all your info from biased sources.
I've never understood why people hate Google so much (aside from youtube, but that's independantly managed so i don't blame their decisions entirely on google).
@@timmyanimations8321 Other reasons:
- Manifest V3
- Google Search censorship/poor quality
@@timmyanimations8321 people don't have google that much in general. only people who care about privacy do.
I'm really disappointed in Mozilla for the reasons described in this video.
But I still use hardened Firefox because I just don't see any better alternatives.
I would rather not use a chromium based browser.
Same. For me, hardened Firefox is the "best of the worst".
Waterfox + uBlockOrigin.
It's currently my way of browsing the web. I can't think of anything better.
What about Ungoogled Chromium?
@@Supervideo1491idk about OP but its probably because of chromium monopoly or somethin like that
Ungoogled chromium is among the best you can pick right now, though at a convenience cost and I doubt it will prove very useful if the framework changes push through.
"Remember that fox browser?"
That one I've been using since forever?
same
time for all websites to block firefox
@@coshvjicujmlqef6047 bad idea. We need to have more browsers not less.
Firefox isn't like it used to be. Anyone remember DownloadHelper?
@@coshvjicujmlqef6047 Monopolies from multi billion dollar datamining companies are not a good thing.
The most important reason that Firefox needs to thrive is because it is the only alternative to Chromium, which is every other browser. If Firefox goes, Chromium will be everything, there will be a 100% monopoly, no competition.
I use Firefox.
I started using it because Opera got rid of their best features like tab stacking and their email client, and switched to chromium.
I continue to use Firefox because I do not wish for an internet where Google controls the entire presentation layer.
I am okay with Firefox because they provide me the tools to turn off the bullshit, and make it a better experience for myself.
Ever since Opera was sold to the Chinese, I knew that I had to go with the fox.
opera got rid of tab stacking?? that's like one of the best browser features ever why did they do that
@@travis5732 Yeah Opera is pretty much compromised. Opera also bought Gamemaker and the way they're starting to treat the devs who use it is really sketchy.
If you liked Opera for those features, Vivaldi has them. It has an email client, tab stacking, tab work spaces, web panels, and more.
@@yonderalt2662 im using vivaldi right now! that's why it's so shocking to me like... it's so helpful
Firefox might gain some new users if Google finally ends up banning ad blockers from chrome
Yeah, I'm not sure how much they're really going to push back against Google when they're on Google's leash
@@EricMurphyxyzthey've already stated that they will continue supporting WebRequest and other features that allow content blocking even after manifest v3 changes unlike chrome, sure whether they will continue to do so 4 years after google drops it is difficult to say, but considering they're going through all the effort of making their own implementation I doubt they will just conform to chrome.
@@EricMurphyxyzfirefox already protested google's web intergrity api so they arent 100% leashed
@itselysianThey might once they start seeing ads despite having an adblocker.
@itselysian yeah but im pretty much sure that adblock are pretty much crippled unless users can trust them with all the data of the browser
Up until about 5 years ago, FireFox had a neat feature where you could right-click a bookmark and one of the options was a text-box in which you could enter descriptions (which must've taken up an imperceptible amount of code). People were using this box to store their user-names and password hints so it could be brought up when using that bookmark. FireFox said they removed it because their telemetry said few people were using this feature. In reality, people using these text-boxes tended to be power-users who also blocked telemetry. 😖
And that is why I don't block telemetry. Too many useful features used by power users get killed because of this.
@@Dwarg91 Mozilla saying that they removed it because telemetry reported little usage was pure B.S. (In other words, they're saying "You turning off telemetry mislead us into turning off useful features, so it's YOUR fault!") The text-box was *already being auto-populated by each website by default* when the bookmark was made. But since it wasn't over-written during subsequent visits, it was unique and very useful for those of us who knew how to take advantage of it.
@@Dwarg91 and that's why I block it: developers taking dumb decisions based on wrong interpretation of data.
@@chpsilva except blocking it gives them incorrect data.
@@Dwarg91 they can't make decisions based sorely on the lack of data. Besides, allowing extensive telemetry would defeat the entire "privacy first" premise.
I use firefox because google keeps threatening to break ad blocking plugins, and the fact they think its okay to say it at all makes it clear its not a place to stay, so a change had to be made. That leaves firefox as the next best option. Many of my IT friends did it for the same reason, at the same timeframe. It's not better, it's just not claiming its going to get worse. This is just where we are in the browser space now, sadly.
Can't honestly say I have ever seen a website not work on firefox though, wtf web devs lol
exactly
This.
That is why I switched.
google chrome is the easiest browser to hack
I'm a firefox user and I strip many of these features and change the settings. I can completely understand why some people leave Firefox for privacy reasons, but moving towards Chrome for that doesn't make sense. Moving to a more obscure privacy focused browser would make more sense. At the moment I'll happily move to a forked Firefox browser where I can still use the same extensions.
i moved to waterfox for a while, but went back to firefox because of convinience
at least firefox lets you harden the f outta it
What if Basilisk Browser?
I use Floorp which is a forked Firefox browser and I love it! maybe you should check it out
LibreWolf maybe? Hell, just use tor at this point. You still get privacy benefits from using tor on the clearnet.
I think a lot of the Firefox decline is due to more people acquiring computers. As non-tech people acquire computers, they use whatever other people give them and don't look much further. They use their computers as appliances for accessing Facebook or TH-cam. They don't know what their browser is. I've heard, in person, someone say "my circle is gone". They deleted their link to Chrome on their Windows 11 desktop.
There is also the increase in the use of Chromebooks. These use Chrome. That means a huge chunk of the education market uses Chrome. If the market increases and the number of users stays the same, Firefox will see its market share decline.
The decrease in users can be partly described by people jumping ship. I know people who moved to Edge. I know people who moved to Chrome. There are also a lot of people who moved to alternatives like Vivaldi and Librewolf.
There are so many confounding variables.
I know, it's not just one variable that explains Firefox's downfall. But in this video I wanted to show that a lot of the blame still rests on Mozilla's shoulders.
@@EricMurphyxyz
Yes. That's likely very true. But, it would do us all well to remember what killed Netscape if we want to know why they are currently in decline.
There's also the TH-camr factor. A lot of the more privacy-conscious TH-camrs have been pushing people away from Mozilla.
But, really, who wants pocket? I have it disabled in my NixOS config.
the same reason people use edge
@@obscene-c1 People use Edge because it is pre installed and windows harasses people if they try to switch.
@@davidturcotte831 exactly what i said and windows kinda sucks tbh
"Mozilla's failed projects are even giving Google's graveyard a run for it's money." Not even comparable. Nobody kills more products than Google.
True but given the size of mozilla, it is also terrifying.
They’re killing off web features. That’s what’s pissing me off as a web developer. Mozilla and Apple are having a cock fight on who can become the next IE11.
I buy a google pixel. It has cool new features. Then it updates and the features are gone. WTF.
@@Fooney1Yeah they keep removing and adding things. I wish they had a built in denoiser for videos.
@@SakugaAsu I wish you could turn on the flashlight while taking a picture. I know it has flash but how the hell do i see what im taking a picture of before i snap it?
Amazing to see how Firefox’s worst enemy is Mozilla themselves.
At least Librewolf a pretty close example to what a stock Firefox install should be
Looks very cool, I may give it a try
@@NicksLockeryeah but hardened Firefox is better
Yeah, Librewolf is a fork of Firefox without Mozilla's crap
Only downside is, their support is limited, only support AMD64 architecture, not ARM64 and i really wished I could use it on my Raspberry Pi
I use Librewolf for my bank transactions. It's pretty good at that and for transferring money too.
How big is the developer base?
If google kills ad blocker on TH-cam we could see a landslide of users.
They are about to remove the access to their API meaning that there will be no addblocker anywhere not just on youtube...
@@72lololol FBI recommends adblocker for safety. Can google afford exposing users to malware by disabling the tool that protects the users?
Ye thats why ive switched
@@D.von.N maybe Google can't on the whole web but it can on its own website (youtube)
@@D.von.NIf Google gets rid of adblockers or lobbies them to be removed, it might actually be considered monopolistic behavior since you’re forcing everyone away from adblockers that actually block a lot of harmful malware. If Google does nothing to protect anybody’s personal information, they could be hit with either a lawsuit or cease and desist note, meaning a lawsuit from somebody who has had their data leaked, or a cease and desist note from the U.S. Government.
There's another huge factor Eric Murphy completely misses as to why Mozilla's Firefox is failing - Brave.
Mozilla ran their founder out of the company on fake accusations of the usual, racism, misogamy and the like, then that new CEO who's paying herself more and more money while dancing on the grave of Mozilla. The founder when and founded a new privacy focused browser, Brave, as a fork of the popular Chrome browser, so when you use Brave, you basically get Chrome but without Google's tracking and spyware junk. If you were to have added Brave's market share into the mix, I suspect you'd see Brave's market share growing as Mozilla's shrinks.
Also not mentioned specifically, but which was a huge factor in me leaving Firefox for Brave was that Firefox changed their whole UI from being it's own thing to being just a cheap imitation of Chrome. I'm not a fan of the Chrome UI, though I have gotten used to it and tolerate it in Brave, I really liked the classic Firefox UI, and found it WAT MORE user friendly then this jam everything into one cryptic place so you can't figure out where anything is as there's no logical groupings anymore crap that these "experts" SAY is EASIER on the user.
Remember Firefox?
yes. I'm watching this in a firefox browser
Yeah same
same here xd
damnit, me too
Yup me too
same
Two reasons why I still use it:
- it puts Meta sites into their own corner/compartment so they don't creep into other tabs
- Style Editor in the dev tools which is not in other browsers
There is style editor in edge
funny enough, i use firefox specifically to run old flash files into a browser.
An old version of firefox.
Brave browser is what i'm stuck with at the moment.
@@guanciottaman checked just now-it doesn't.
Firefox has an entire Style Editor (same group where you'd find Console, Network, etc) tab where you can go ham with adding and testing CSS.
@@tim_t oh maybe it's in edge dev only (I use it everyday so I'm sure)
@@guanciottaman is that similar to FireFox Dev Edition where it’s a separate browser?
LibreWolf gang rise up
But speaking of Firefox itself, I use it because it's the second largest browser that isn't chromium-based. We need to keep google from monopolizing the web. Recently I got my grandparents to switch to Firefox (in the process of making them switch from windows to GNU/Linux aswell), doing my best to help.
I started using Librewolf on my Debian laptop recently and it's been nice. It's kind of like Tor, but without the ability to connect to onion sites and auto-VPN connection. I highly recommend getting a decent VPN to pair with LibreWolf for a much better privacy experience.
please dont be that guy that says GNU/Linux
also as far as i know firefox ran same/ faster than chrome
which is neat
@@Name_cannot_be_blank I like Firefox and use it on every device, but you can't deny its flaws.
The video playback performance is worse, by a lot. A video (4k/60fps) and very high bitrate brings my work laptop to a crawl under firefox. Chrome handles it with 0 issues.
@@Name_cannot_be_blank Just so you know, I am not a hardcore Arch elitist. I use Linux Mint as my OS and I mainly say GNU/Linux out of irony, to make fun of those elitists.
@@Name_cannot_be_blank Firefox's JavaScript engine is slower
People seeing how 70 MILLION MONTHLY USERS went away and shrugging it off to Google's marketing has to be the stupidest take i can see. Great video.
Mozilla's methods of integrating ads into Firefox reminds me of how Ubuntu was in the 2010s with Amazon
🤮
Wasn’t that also Firefox ?
Basically what’s happening is Google keeping poor Firefox half-alive through Mozilla, so that they don’t have a monopoly but they don’t have competition either.
and that complacency of "we'll get money anyway, so why even try" does the rest...
A big reason Firefox lost market share is because of the proliferation of Android, iOS, and "Chrome" devices that predominately use the default browser. PC users don't want to admit it, but they're not the king of the hill anymore when it comes to userbase. For most of the world, mobile devices aren't just their daily driver, it's their only means of getting online.
Exactly! Even Microsoft tried to make their UI look and act more like an overgrown cell phone, but the PC userbase was still large enough that their complaints were cared about. If MS did that today, there wouldn't be nearly the same level of pushback. Heck, I have friends and family that don't even have a PC anymore, when years ago, they ALL had a PC.
There are desktop specific market share graphs for browsers though and Firefox has consistently been losing its desktop audience over the years.
@@dillonandon Though that's true, it's not quite as bad as shown in the video.
@@dillonandon And losing the desktop audience to Google Chrome - not to MS IE and MS Edge, which come pre-installed on (roughly) 75% of desktop machines. Or Safari (pre-installed on (roughly) 20% of desktop machines).
Chrome comes pre-installed on about 3% of all desktop machines, Firefox comes pre-installed on most Linux desktop machines (about 3% market share in the desktop market).
Thanks to rounding, the numbers do not add up to 100%, I know. It's just to give some ballpark figures.
I guess the main sell point for Firefox was always that it was "anti-Microsoft". So an other browser entering the "not-Microsoft" market share hit them hard..
Yeah there would. There's still a LOT of Windows users. @@TheREALJosephTurner
I remember when Mozilla added Auto-JavaScript execution by default in PDF files within the browser. So much about "privacy & security"... was one of the moments where I really noticed that they are going downhill with bad decisions.
It's a tiny subset of javascript.
What speed are you missing by using firefox? If there is a difference? it must be miliseconds because I don't notice any issues with the speed of Firefox. Why did you say you can't log in with your google account and sync firefox across all your devices? That's UNTRUE, it absolutely syncs across devices, seamlessly. What webites have you used that dont support Firefox? 20 years now and I haven't had that issue.
The only difference an uninformed user would notice is a different UI and different extensions. You get used to the layout, and all the big extensions have a Firefox version. Almost every chrome feature is also available on FF, and it's not like they work worse or anything.
Consumes way more ram to me
I agree. I'm one of the minority that has Gecko browsers actually work faster for me. I've also only ever had one site break in Firefox, ironically after I loaded into it on Brave and put the link back into Librewolf it magically worked lol. I also don't get how strict tracker blocking breaks sites as it's never happened to me, it's only ever been my strict LW or uBO settings that have broken websites, never Firefox's tracker blocking.
it''s heartbreaking to watch this video being a firefox user since version 3.5, but you are correct in the fact that the only people who care about firefox nowadays are the loyal fans, even though it's not same anymore i still refuse to use any chromium based browser
C my bigger comment above re why ff is dying and brave
@@konnorj6442brave is Chinese botnet
Love Firefox.
@@konnorj6442 brave is chromium
I’ve used Google Chrome for several years, only really remember using Firefox or internet explorer like 10-12 years ago at the computer labs. About several months ago, I was just sick of Google and downloaded Firefox. I’m not tech savvy or crazy about anything, but that with uBlock and user agent switcher is golden. Can say now, am loyal to Firefox
I use and continue to use Firefox as my primary browser but I'm worried that it may actually fade into insignificance until the word "Firefox" doesn't ring a bell anymore for most people.
Man if they are as shady as it seems fuck them. Im just worried that there is no real alternatives. Because fuck google and microsoft.
yes it does
I use Libewolf, its essentially Firefox but if they kept their promises and community maintained
> Remember Firefox?
I'm using it.
I would also love to see Firefox become better again. The only reason for me, to still use it is the privacy add-ons. I've got a lot them installed and there is no other browser, I can get such an effective setup with.
- Every website containerized
- AdBlock
- Tracking Blocker
- Very strict cookie policy, with everything removed, when leaving a website, or closing a tab
- Canvas hash scrambled
- Changing user agent on every new call
Sadly, my Firefox for Android lacks two vital add-ons and I somewhat lost hope, they will come, or come back
- No Cookie Auto delete
- No Containers
Untill Mozilla changed the mobile Firefox, I could use almost every Add-on from the desktop version. Now there are just the few specific ones.
You can have all that with plugins and proper configuration.
This is why I use librewolf. It's firefox but with the bad stuff removed and its community is what develops it not an organization.
Best you can do right now short of userscripts for firefox, but at the end of the day if firefox goes down the drain then librewolf doesn't have the resources to truly fork off and pull it back up.
i think librewolf is irrelevant if you have arkenfox
@@phr3ui559 as long as Mozilla doesn't do anything funny that affects userscripts on update, yeah, it is about the same difference.
@@phr3ui559 Why is that?
why not 32 bits version available?
I remember when Firefox was the new upstart that was eating the Mozilla browser’s lunch. It grew, was adopted, and finally became the same unresponsive thing it was forked to replace.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
You and me both. Except, laughably, it got bigger than the old browser while doing a lot less. No composer, no mail, and what was the other feature? IRC?
@eekee6034 Usenet was the other, and maybe RSS later on, but by the time RSS got big I'd moved on to Firefox and Thunderbird so I can't say for sure.
@@desertdude540 Oh of course! Thanks
We are old, brother, two decades
To me the existence of Firefox with its own engine is crucial.
I tend to agree with a lot of the things you mention in the video. I am not too concerned with the lower performance in benchmarks in Firefox. In real-life situations I do not feel the performance gap, and most tools today tend to be run in a browser. I feel (this is very much subjective) that the performance of Firefox is adequate, improvements are welcome, but it works as is.
I actually think that the developer tools in Firefox are superior to those in Chrome. Then again I am not a web developer, I work with software development, and has done so for 20 years, but I have mostly managed to stay out of web development, so obviously my views are not those of a professional web developer.
Chromium or rather Blink is a really good engine, don't get me wrong. The problem is that it is holding the major share of the browser market. With only really Mozillas Gecko (or I guess it's Quantum now) as an alternative. Some will say that having only one engine is a good thing as it creates a more uniform web. As someone who clearly remembers the time of Internet Explorer dominance I heavily disagree.
One engine to rule them all is not something to desire. First and foremost last time we had one engine to rule them all, we were hit by stale innovation, and questionable design decisions. And while Blink might be open source, in practice it is being pushed by large corporations, who are serving their own interest rather than that of consumer.
In general innovation is good, for instance Mozillas choice to switch to Rust, is something that has potential to increase stability of the browser. If all engines are based on the same base, then the possibility space for innovation is decreased.
One other problem with Blink is the list of companies supporting it, Mozilla might not have made the best decisions, and might have a moral issue with regards to their actions. But it is nothing against the list of companies supporting Blink: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta, just to mention a few. Compared to those Mozilla is small company. And sure there might be smaller companies creating alternative browsers, but they are almost always based on Blink. Do we really think that they have any actual impact on the features that the big companies put into the engine?
More importantly do we really think than any of the big companies would allow any contributions to the engine, that would harm their income sources. So for companies who live on personal data, it is unlikely that features limiting personal data exposure will make it into the engine.
One example of the above can be found here: www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23131029/mozilla-ad-blocking-firefox-google-chrome-privacy-manifest-v3-web-request The blink engines decision to switch to manifest version 3, will remove many of the most efficient ad blockers. Who defended version 2 and ad-blocker support? Mozilla. So for all the issues they have, they still remain one of the strongest proponents of privacy, at least that can offer a viable alternative to Blink/Chromium based browsers.
So I do not trust Mozilla, but given the choice between Mozilla and the usual suspects: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta I will choose Mozilla every day.
One last thought, given that Blink and the companies behind it has more than 95% market share, why do we need to visit a Mozilla page for the best web development reference: developer.mozilla.org I think people tend to forget the huge contributions to the modern web that Mozilla has been behind.
So I agree that Mozilla has made questionable decisions, I am not concerned about changes to the browser, I am concerned about addition of services such as Pocket that harms privacy. They should have made it as an extension instead. But the alternative is in my opinion worse.
I have been looking for good forks of the Gecko/Quantum engine, but so far I have not found a proper one. Tor is a special case and in my opinion not a general browser, but a specialist tool for special use cases.
>I have been looking for good forks of the Gecko/Quantum engine, but so far I have not found a proper one. Tor is a special case and in my opinion not a general browser, but a specialist tool for special use cases.
What do you think of LibreWolf or IceCat?
These are some good points but I have one small nitpick: Apple uses WebKit (which is a fork of KHTML) and Blink is a fork of WebKit. Apple had WebKit for a long time before Google got into the browser market and at this point they have diverged enough that they warrant separate testing when developing for the web.
I actually find chrome feels worse after usage time and lots of tabs open.
@@cultist7931 IceCat has as far as I know not been updated for quite some time and is not really a usable alternative. LibreWolf was back when I tried it promising but not yet stable, might be time for another go. Waterfox also proved to be a viable option, more polished than LibreWolf, but LibreWolf had better privacy defaults.
As a fullstack developer my self, I love mozilla docs 🙂
You've missed a big point: even if Mozilla didn't care about privacy at all, that would still be miles better than alphabet being actively hellbent at sniping every last bit of privacy.
true. privacy is not binary.
I was using Firefox since the version 2.0. I finally gave up on them a few months ago. Imposing the proton update with the huge top after so many people expressed their disagreement was a big FU to the users. Customization was one of the huge force of Firefox. I tried Brave and never looked back.
Maybe try a UXP browser like Pale Moon or Basilisk.
@@pseudodistant and then you're effectively using an outdated version of firefox
@@Gamerappa except it is still updated. :/
It got a lot of Defense in Depth updates that eventually became severe CVEs on Firefox that Pale Moon had fixed years back.
It's likely more secure than Firefox these days...
All of this is pretty damning, but having worked in multiple fields of IT for various organizations, I think its simply integration and lack of user awareness that's bringing Firefox's numbers down. Organizations typically use one of two systems and that's Google's Workspace/G Suite, or Microsoft's 365 environment and both of those pair with their respective browsers of Chrome and Edge (which of course is Chromium based).
The education sector skews these numbers as well, especially in the US. Student devices are Chromebooks and their accounts are through Google. Even if the teachers have Windows devices they also typically have Google accounts using Google services (I.E Classroom) to integrate with their students better and this is all predominantly done through Chrome which is often pre-installed on faculty devices anyways.
This argument can be even further enforced by looking at the next browser down the list from Chrome, and that is Safari with ~25% market share in browsers. Considering that Safari isn't even available outside of Apple devices that rules out user preference especially since Windows devices still hold by and large majority market share for desktop computers. Safari's numbers are coming purely from people using iPhones, iPads (which make up 20%-22% of mobile device market share) and Mac computers.
Though of course Edge is also one of the least used (although still more used that Firefox lol) and that's because most people just use Google for services like email, TH-cam, Docs, Sheets, etc... So of course the first time they go to sign into Google on a new device they get that nice "install Chrome now" pop up, and they know that the browser they download will instantly sync to their old one so they don't have to re-learn anything. It's just convenience.
I'll also add that personally I've worked with enough end-users over the years to know that they don't care about their privacy until something violates it right in their face. Most of them could care less about trackers and user data until you point it out to them and even then they'll take the convenience of that over privacy as soon as it annoys them. It's why DuckDuckGo has such low market share in search engines. I use DDG every day, but if you're the kind of user that's used to getting your desired link in the first 3 search results the DDG isn't for you because you have to dig a little deeper than that most of the time.
Yep. You hit the nail.
Microsoft killed Netscape by integrating Explorer into Windows.
Google is killing Firefox by integrating Chrome into Android.
@@lesath7883 I seem to recall that Netscape killed Netscape by being endlessly "beta" with runaway feature creep, speaking as someone who installed it and uninstalled it shortly after. Microsoft just hammered some nails into the coffin with IE.
yeah DDG gives bad results sometimes, but it can also just give results not listed in google. my favorite feature is the bangs, so that I can quickly query google if I really need to
This is so spot on.
@@boristheengineer5160 The lawsuit against Microsoft said otherwise.
Wow Kermit really dislikes Firefox
Not private by default, but it is one of the few browsers you can make as private as you want, and be free from the chains of Chromium. That's why I'm staying till the bitter end.
(i use librewolf btw)
One thing that has been bothering me about Firefox in recent years is when they constantly take away Customization Options, as weell as making many changes to Force users to having Tabs above the Address bar, like every other modern browser. However, that5 does make it harder for me to move the Entire Window between my two screens, since I would sometimes accidently grab and move only a single a Tab. I also prefer the old wqay where the Tab is attached to the actual browsing section.
You can right click above the adress bar and click "show menu bar". It will show empty space at the top of tha window that you can grab onto.
Or Mozilla can stop forcing its preferences on users and support the legacy (not stupid) way.
"Tabs above the Address bar " is reason I refuse to upgrade my Firefox. I was furious when I upgraded and they change's that. I tried few scripts and it works fine but no upgrade never again. I don't really care about safety (I use computer Firefox rarelt for normal browsing, if they want to know I search for coloring pages for my children, go ahead, lol) do I don't need newest version. I just want browser that works and don't changes
Alternative method to switch windows between screens is using hotkeys. On Windows it's WIN+Shift+Cursor Left/Right, on Linux it can be customized similarly. I find it much easier and faster than dragging with the mouse. I mostly use windows maximized, too.
@@monilipwhat is "normal browsing"?
When I used Windows (2019-2022), Firefox was the only browser I actually liked. I tried Edge, and I gave it many opportunities, and it worked great.
But I was just very satisfied with with Firefox’s performance and customization.
I started using Firefox only because of the Privacy features, but I genuinely grew to like it and rely on it. Even when I tried other browsers, I kept on coming back to Firefox. Unfortunately there are websites that don’t work well, but that was just not enough for me to change it as the default.
Yep! There are a few specific reasons I keep using it despite dubious privacy issues:
- I like the customizable layout.
- I like the easy-to-understand settings that don't try to obfuscate privacy settings for the sake of "ease of use."
- I like the extensive library of privacy extensions.
- I like not needing to have EVERY LAYER of my internet experience logged into one account/online-identity. I don't even have a Firefox Account.
- I LOVE the Multi-Accounts Container sandboxing extension! It allows me not only to log into the same site multiple times, but also to prevent one website from accessing the cookies of EVERY OTHER SITE I currently have open in the browser. For example, I have a dedicated container that only allows me to access or connect to Facebook if I'm in the *facebook* container, disallowing tracking cookies from all other sites.
I never understood where the "website doesn't work on ff" came from. I only ever had some sites not working on old Opera back when they still had their own engine. Never with FF.
For me it never was the privacy that enticed me. It was because Firefox is the only browser that's not based in Chromium. I don't remember what was the deal with that, but I guess that involves something like "If chromium fails, every other browser fails"
Same, I switched back to Firefox a few years ago not for privacy. But because of how chrome would use a lot of my laptop's ram. Even though now I have a better laptop, I still stick with Firefox because I find it better than chromium based browsers. I'd only use chrome in places where I can't use Firefox, or if a webpage doesn't currently support Firefox.
The reasonI switched was because I don't want to give google a monopoly on browsers. There are already inetances where they prupose Stuff against the W3C because yeah, if do it, everbody else has to follow
@@pyp2205 firefox uses way more cpu and gpu 🤦♂
@@saphi20 My task manager says otherwise.
@@saphi20Firefox on single tab uses more resources than Chromium based browsers
But the case is different in multiple tabs
Privacy is important, but to me, customization is even more important than that. That was one of the main things I loved about Firefox way back when. You could change and play around with so many things that the other browsers at the time simply wouldn't let you touch! Sadly, it seems like that is a thing of the past - even something as simple as disabling CORS without installing some shady extensions is easier done in Chrome than in Firefox. If someone came out with an alternative browser focused on having as many features as possible for power users, then I'd switch to that in a heartbeat.
Try out Arc, their fork of chromium is completely ungoogled. The customisation is mind boggling. It’s actually the best browser I’ve tried. More performant than chrome itself too.
I have try vivaldi for some month and it have the most parameters i've seen in a software. The thing i liked the most was the tab stacking as i keep every tab i left in the last session (i should really clean that mess sometimes). I don't remember why but I switched back to firefox.
Absolutely underrated comment. Customization is what makes the thing and sadly, the move to Quantum was a big slap in the face, but it's stilly by far the best.
Also: If it doesn't have about:config, it's not a browser.
Don't forget tabs. They invented tabs.
Yeah, it is the main reason I am "vendor locked" to Firefox. I think it is still far ahead of other browsers when it comes to customizability as most of them relied too much on chromium. I still have the Photon compact UI with the Lepton chrome CSS, but they are also backing on that end with the addition of the unified extension icon, you can no longer put extension icons in the overflow menu.
It is also used as the base for 3 privacy based projects, Tor Browser, Arkenfox, and Librewolf, which the last is what I am using.
I think I tried Opera and Edge as some people claim they have good customizability, but it didn't take long for me to turn away. Don't think I have tried Vivaldi though. The closest I have tried is surprisingly KDE Falkon, which uses QtWebEngine which in turn depends on Google's Blink engine, but it is a lightweight browser and without all the crucial plugins I need.
All good points. I still use hardened Firefox because it's pretty much the only decent open source alternative, but it's a shame to have to go through many hoops to configure the browser to be privacy-respecting.
The thing that made me first switch to Firefox was that Chrome was having frequent memory leak issues, which never happened to me with Firefox. I started hardening a little bit past that point, but I don't get what people mean by Chrome being faster.
Maybe Chrome is faster, but you would only ever notice it if you ran them side by side.
I don't notice any difference in performance between Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Actually, Firefox uses less RAM. I mostly use Edge but I switch between the others sometimes for some specific uses.
They compare milliseconds, but in the end no one notice
Firefox CONSTANTLY gets improved and is FAR MORE desirable than all other browsers.
Firefox won't tie up computer resources unnecessarily, and isn't a lead brick like Chrome is, which also spies on you, just like internet explorer also spies on you. Chromium isn't much different. Brave browser is also very nice, but it may be just a bit too simplistic.
me watching it using firefox with 209 tabs: interesting
(209 tabs on chrome will just get shrunk to oblivion, and no, I don't like using onetab)
I always like to say that librewolf is what firefox was supposed to be, actually private with sensible defaults and great fingerprinting protection out of the box, not chromium based (actually it uses the same browser engine as firefox) and yk the people behind it actually listen to and care about their community. That is why I converted from firefox to librewolf.
What do you use for mobile then?
@@bear17293there's Mull on Android operating on the same idea
Librewolf seems cool, I'll keep it in mind
I use Fennec for mobile, it's okey.
same
I now mainly use Firefox but still keep brave around in case a site doesn’t work properly. I’m hoping that the ladybird browser eventually gets good enough for daily use, it would be really cool to have another non-chromium based mainstream browser.
What I hugely respect Mozilla for are their MDN web docs. The go to please to learn about developing the web, web APIs and more. They really did a great job with these docs.
Um, this is just wrong, you can just sign in a synch across devices, in a new device, when signing in, you not only get access to your bookmarks, but everything, extensions and even some extension settings get installed, your history, browser preferences and themes. And you can seamlessly switch between all devices and send tabs between devices. I'm disregarding this whole video as biased or poorly reaserched just from that one lie
I had been using Firefox for 15 years or so. Every new update I was dreading the UI being messed up and wondering which features would get axed. Asking on their ticketing system to add back features that had been supported for years was met with dismissive replies from the maintainers. Eventually I realized that switching to a different browser would be easier than to stick with Firefox...
I'm curious, which features are those? Maybe someone can fork them into a new release
@@mrkosmos9421 I mean, it's been going on for years. The most recent thing was when they removed browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll (which gives you the ability to siable selecting the whole url when clicking on the url bar). Once it was clear they wouldn't add it back, I did make my own fork but after a while I just couldn't be bothered with it any more.
After that I still used FF for a while but the constant UI changes eventually tired me out.
Which did you switch to?
@@technicolourmyles I ended up with Brave, it sucks that it's chromium-based but it works well enough
@@mrkosmos9421 For example: The simple feature to have the tab bar below your address bar.
Yes it's very basic but thats why it's even more baffling why such simple customisation options get removed.
As a longtime Firefox user, I've never had a huge problem with it but they don't seem to do anything interesting or different - that's from a UI and usability standpoint. All this that you talked about regarding privacy is really troubling. I recently switched to Vivaldi, and while yes it has the same base code as Chrome, they put a LOT of extra effort into both the UI and privacy. There's an interview with the Vivaldi CEO on Techlore's channel - definitely worth a watch, and it's what helped make my mind up to switch. People like DT say it's "proprietary garbage," but Vivaldi is very open about their stances on privacy and putting users first, and AFAIK all the code is reviewable even if you can't re-use it.
Vivaldi isn't open source.
Yes I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi too. For me it were mainly the UI changes coming with Firefox 89. I still don't understand it but the changelog said something like »Most of users activity is in the top bar so we removed most of the buttons to make it easier«
I understand the reason they didn't fully open source their project, but they can promise however they want, it won't make them more trustworthy: Google does to it, while it completely steals every bit of information from its users.
So I'd always prefer a fork of Firefox than a proprietary Vivaldi. OR, they need to release a fully open source, even if it means it's not as pretty as their proprietary blob.
That would be their best try at gaining users by earning trust.
Vivaldi is a great browser but I can understand why some people don't use it cause of the proprietary stuff
I am not a sheep, I will stay with Firefox.
Wolf gang here :-)
Represent
@@EricMurphyxyz btw great video buddy,valid points covered hope they improve because nobody like us wants to shift to shitty chrome :-)
My tribe has arrived!
Me too, been using librewolf for 3 months now, after I started caring more about privacy
That's why I use... Brave ! It's what Firefox was, but actually is. Plus, it's open source. And it's based on Chromium (Chrome's base) so it's convenient, fast and easy to use. It's also compatible with lots of websites, but since websites actually only allows Edge and Chrome, Brave often gets blocked for no reason at all because with some extensions you can make the site thinks you're on Chrome without losing any performance or anything compared to Chrome.
I'm probably using them too.
This is why I'm so interested in forks of Firefox. It's all the benefits of not using Chrome, plus actual privacy in many cases.
I have used Firefox for a really long time, especially because it allows me to navigate through my tabs, while Chrome and Edge keep shrinking them and eventually stop showing them.
Yes, I know I have issues.
Eventually, the privacy, adblock and containers stuff kept me into it, but with this information I might just switch to a fork before it starts being awful... but after I save all the tabs I have open
I use Firefox for similarly unusual UI reasons. :) In my case, it's the quick access to tabs & everything in full-screen mode.
One thing I think made Firefox lose marketshare was that Quantum, while being a massive and 100% needed improvement to the browser, was too little too late for people, and every change they've made since has been completely braindead in my opinion.
They should have done it in 2014/15 rather then 2017 because at this point i noticed that the Browser began to slow down compered to others. However still enjoing Firefox to this day
I use Firefox and the reasons as to why I do so are complicated:
- It's not chromium-based
- At least you could do Hardening if things get dire
- It's preferred by Linux users (although i'm not one)
- I used to use Chrome but I switched to Firefox out of fear when I realised Chrome was acting a bit weird once
- I figured that if Chrome starts being all 1984 and bans ad-blockers I could take refuge in Firefox perhaps (unless they give in to Google).
- Using it feels unironically unique from the others who use Chrome or Edge (a stupid reason, i know)
- Another stupid reason but, I like foxes in general, including an anime kitsune called Senko and the character Firefox-chan by Merryweather :)
Don't get me wrong, I know that the browser is far from private, however some reasons why I use it are sentimental (not very logical), and also because I've kind of given up on trying other browsers. As you said, the thing that makes me salty is that apart from anti-privacy bloatware such as Pocket, some things don't work on Firefox but obviously work better in chromium-based browsers, such as certain browser extensions and websites sometimes (every now and then stuff is buggy in Firefox, like google sign-in pages saying "Something went wrong", but when I try another browser it works fine). In addition there's a social issue: when someone came across me using Firefox once they looked down on me asking me why I still use it in this day and age (and I don't blame him since I have weird reasons, but still it hurt).
I switched back to Firefox a few years ago. That reason being Chrome using up my memory, even if I have a couple tabs open. As for privacy, well I honestly think it's almost impossible to have privacy on the internet.
Switching to Firefox with some mods from github is the best decision ive made. Since it is open source, there are many mods you can add. More privacy, more snapiness, etc. Im loving it so far
what mods are u using?
The average user doesn't care about privacy. Firefox became popular because after IE 6 Microsoft dropped the browser ball by not deciding not to release any new IE versions independently of new Windows releases. When Longhorn/Vista got stuck in development hell there was no new version of IE for Windows XP in development so IE 6 just stagnated for years. That is when Firefox seized its opportunity. MS eventually released IE 7 which began a long and slow process of clawing back relevance in the desktop browser space for MS. Chrome then came into the scene as well as the increasing popularity of OSX with Safari. Then the mobile revolution happened...Chrome became the default on Android and Safari on iOS. Finally, Edge is essentially fine on Windows now.
I've always used firefox and it's not that much slower in comparison to chrome or chromium based browsers, nor are there many pages that don't work on firefox. I didn't know the privacy part though, thanks for the video
Having Google as the default search engine is honestly good, because then Google pays their competitor for something users can easily change. However, the other Google tracking that Mozilla allows makes this a difficult argument to make. Mozilla doesn’t even use their own location services by default; you have to change it away from Google manually in the about config.
Bad in the long term though. 1.) As Eric pointed out, the main thing with Firefox is supposed to be privacy, but if the default search engine and so many of their other practices betray this, then many people will not see the point in using it over Chrome or one of the Chromium derivatives. 2.) Making Google the default gets more people used to using Google services and makes it much easier for that person to switch over.
And on a side note, Mozilla's choice to look and behave closer to Chrome might have been done to make it seem easier for Chrome users to switch, but also makes it easier for Firefox users to switch to Chrome.
I'm suddenly thankful I've never had a real reason to use location services on the desktop. Not that they work on the occasions I've tried them -- Nottingham is not even the nearest city. :)
@@AlbedoAtoned You just get back to my point. No one needs to use the default; it can be changed. Where it becomes problematic is when there are over a hundred non-private defaults.
I’ve changed nearly 200 things in my about config. The sketchiest part about it is that my hardened Firefox is most likely unique, which means it probably won’t blend in with anything. I still learned a lot doing it, though, and I’ve shored some really obvious problems with Firefox’s default configuration, but I can’t possibly recommend it for real privacy.
@@OcteractSG The problem is that most people aren't going to change defaults. They will stick with the vanillla set up almost every time, which is why so many people push for Brave since it comes with an adblocker, despite Ublock Origin being easily available for pretty much every browser out there. Which means they are far less likely to want to edit config files manually, even if they are provided pre-configured ones to use.
The results speak for themselves. Firefox has continued to lose more and more users to Chrome. Which is why I don't recommend Firefox itself, but one of it's forks like Waterfox or LibreWolf. Unlike Firefox, these aren't likely to push people away as much every update.
I've been using Linux since the start (1994) and exclusively since 2006. Never used Chrome in my life, just Firefox and Chromium. With GreaseMonkey and UBlock I can customize to never see anything I don't ever want to see. As a Linux user, I configure my own system to be hardened, and Firefox runs very fast for me, taking little RAM. You just need to know what you're doing.
Indeed it can be done the problem is it used to be quite easy to do and was viable for the avg user now however its largely beyond the capability of such and the asshats in charge at mozilla have actively worked against those of us that actually made firefox good
{Grease/Violent}Monkey is a superb tool 🙂
The blue logo behind the CEO of Mozilla (at 12:23) should tell you everything you need to know about the direction and trustworthiness of Mozilla Corporation.
yeah with google disabling adblockers this has not aged well. current version of FF is great
Netscape was the first browser I ever used, the competition wasn't available on my OS of choice, and when Netscape fizzled out Firefox seemed to be the way to go. Firefox ticks all the boxes for me, it is stable, intuitive and nothing has ever happened to make me dislike it, so I see no reason to change.
Sometimes I wonder if it might be a good idea to make a new, privacy respecting browser from scratch. Problem is, it would likely end up with just a handful of part-time developers and end up in a similar situation to Pale Moon.
Best privacy based browser that's easy to get for the avg is brave
However we need to keep mozilla alive since we cannot allow the web to become chromium based only
JavaScript is insanely stupid, you have mentally ill coercion rules, 28392 different test suites to abide by, don't even talk about JIT because the most one person can create is a tree-walk JS interpreter
if you really want JavaScript support in that theoretical browser you would need to use either V8 or SpiderMonkey which are both huge monoliths that are difficult to compile
I don't think that monopoly is feasible in the grand scheme of things. Even chrome might become a relic in the distant future.
Such browser does exist - GNOME Web, it doesn't depend on Chromium or Firefox, instead it's built on WebKit like Safari and Chromium. It's very lightweight and works great, but many websites that don't have an idea that this browser exists may break. Which exposes the main problem - Chromium is so widespread, on many occasions web developers don't support anything except for in, de-facto current web standard is literally "it should work on Chromium", so creating and maintaining independent browsers is extremely hard
@@konnorj6442Not brave because 1) it's chromium based 2) b. eich is homophobe
Yes, Chrome being advertised in the world's most used search engine is a reason to lose market share. But making a crummy browser doesn't help retaining users. I switched to Chrome when I tested that it actually used *less* memory than FF when opening multiple tabs.
Yeah, the memes about chrome hogging memory were made before FF Quantum, which made every tab its own process just like it is on chrome. The advantage is that one tab can't cause the entire browser to freeze or crash, but it does eat up way more memory.
@@fdagpigjAnd yet Firefox Quantum STILL runs better with a ton of tabs open than Chrome. At least according to some of the comments on this video.
One word brave, works all the time, no ads etc. FF is janky at best now, it breaks all the time too. They removed a lot of great tools.
It's a shame that Mozilla are also the only competitor to Google in terms of Webengine. Your choice is Blink, Gecko or make your own.
There's forks browsers that are used the source from mozilla.
@@AntiGrieferGames yes I use Librewolf.
I used to use Firefox back in the Windows XP days, but when I switched to Windows 7 I also switched over to Waterfox, which is a fork of Firefox that went 64-bit first, and I've stuck with it ever since then. Given Firefox's recent affair with Big Brother I'm glad I got out so long ago. The Waterfox team seems to largely be holding to the same principles that Mozilla used to, and to my knowledge have largely remained apolitical when it comes to things like censorship. The only real issue I've encountered with Waterfox so far is that it is based on an older version of Firefox, so certain websites may not let you login, although this can be circumvented with the right extension.
Yeah I'm basically using the LTS Firefox so I'll have a look into this water Fox.
Google is paying them so they become a failed company. As long as the developers for firefox are being payed to be not private then the for profit business will have no reason to make their browser good when resenting any form of monetization they can get.
They simply get ad revenue from the google based mozilla search, if/when people click ads they get a tiny cut, its long been that way.
If only Microsoft would open source the Trident render engine and Opera open source the Presto render engine, we might be able to have more choice. I remember at one time way back where if you had Opera, IE and either Netscape Navigator or Firefox installed, in Opera you could select which render engine you wanted to use on a web page. Something like that needs to come back. There's also Ungoogled-Chromium, LibreWolf and Midori. There are options, but people like to have expandability too, which is yet another hole that oozes your privacy data. So a lot of the mess is really the user's fault for going with what the big browsers say is good for them and not doing a little bit of digging to see what they are all about behind the scenes, like presented in this video.
Both trident and presto are discontinued and replaced by chromium blink
No kidding those were discontinued. That is why I said they should be open sourced so some actual competent people could optimize them for modern web use.
The whole path of Blink began as KDE's KHTML, then crApple stole^H^H^H^H^H forked it to become WebKit for Safari, then the KDE community threw hands to make crApple open their source, then Google says they didn't want to be under crApple's thumb and forked it to what we now have as Blink.
The main point I was making is that there is not enough choice when it comes to web browser render engines.
@@kreuner11 i think what he's refering is, that instead of leaving to die the engines, the corporations should have instead opted to making them open source
Ain't librewolf based on Firefox?
Eithwr way, both your example (librewolf and Midori) are quite nice
I stopped using when they fired Brendan Eich.
Good video, but now that TH-cam has lost the anti-adblock war, and Google gets ready for the Chrome-apocalypse (Manifest V3), Firefox is becoming incredibly relevant again. For anyone that still wants to use an as blocker, at least.
They lost me when they said they support regulation and censorship of the internet.
This is a great and informative video and I agree with almost everything you said. One thing worth mentioning though is that Google Chrome is really f garbage as well. Saying that it's much faster than Firefox is really easy, if you only ever look at JavaScript benchmarks, but Chrome has become REALLY bloated and it lags a lot while scrolling, far more frequently than Firefox does and it's just inherently not very stable. For example Chrome (the Windows version) has to be reinstalled every now and again, hardreseting & deleting the cache rarely helps. Even fresh installs are not great, but the browser just steadily deteriorates over time. Firefox does not have this problem.
I just wish someone forked Firefox & made a new foundation to do some real reinvigorating effort to pick up the fight. I'm totally okay with them following Brave's revenue scheme as well, or something similar. With the way Google is trying to enshittify the entire Internet itself, we need Firefox (or a new derivative) to pick up the slack more than ever before.
Waterfox?
Someone In the comments here talked about something called LibreWolf which Is a fork from Firefox
[Edit] Commenter Is highway_roadkill If you're curious who exactly commented It
I've heard a theory that, since Google is about to break ad blockers and make them nonfunctional, it's going to cause an exodus of people to other browsers, most likely to Firefox or Opera. (Opera does that have a minor scandal going on with that whole GX Aura thing, I imagine everyone is going to forget about it by next week.) The point is, the breaking of Ad blockers is probably what'll save Firefox.
@@mikemongrel5587 It also doesn't have Multi-Account Containers extension.
Let’s get something straight comrades. There’s no such thing as privacy on the Internet. If someone or some company wants to know your shit, they’ll find out. don’t ever delude yourself into thinking otherwise just pick what user interface you like better and that’s that.
I will still continue to use it. It's the last non-chromium based browser.
I still use Firefox, but I died a bit inside when their UI changed. I had to change the internal CSS myself to add visual separators between tabs.
I hate how everything looks like it was made by Apple now. I hope this design trend goes away soon.
Apple's "design language" is just pure cancer... it spreads everywhere and you simply can't get rid of it because it keep popping up at three different places at the same time if you manage to remove it at one place.
It's a shame, really. I've been a staunch user of Firefox for years and for a while, I did use Chrome because of the features it had for web development some years ago that Firefox just did not have or that were buggy, I moved away from it because, well, Google. Firefox doing all this isn't all that surprising, but saddening indeed. If you want Firefox, but more privacy-based, use Tor or Librewolf. Both are good and have their pros and cons, but are far better than Firefox when it comes to privacy and security!
I still use Firefox, because it's one of the only browsers on Android that I trust which supports extensions (uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, the two most important ones for me) while still allowing me to sync data between the phone and the computer. Firefox is good, and honestly, speed-wise, it does actually seem faster than Chrome on my hardware. It also seems to handle some web applications I leave running in the background a bit better - Chrome is very aggressive at throttling back Javascript when a tab is backgrounded, which breaks those tools. Chrome does however support things like AV1 Encoding and HDR TH-cam on Windows, which Firefox lacks.
Firefox for mobile is the goat no question about that.
I stopped using Firefox primarily because I was constantly running into issues with it that nobody helped me resolve that were absent on Chrome.
Same thing with Linux in general, I used to daily drive enthusiast distros like Gentoo or Arch, but I stopped doing so, because I have less and less time to tinker with systems and need my PC to just work and stay out of my way, whether I'm working or gaming.
I still run Linux on my machine for work (though I run Ubuntu these days, because I don't have time for Arch or Gentoo anymore) and don't use Linux for anything else outside of work. Gaming on Linux is still subpar, modding games (which for me is crucial) is not possible on Linux, and even though I only ever use Linux for work, I constantly run into issues, bugs and annoyances that I need to spend my time searching online to fix. Windows for me just works and does almost everything I need to do and never runs into issues or tests my patience (except development is painful to do on Windows, because I already got used to developer workflow on Linux and it's just better in every way imaginable).
The only reason I use Firefox is because of the Manifest V3 debacle. It was a bit of work to migrate to another browser and I am just too lazy to switch again.
4:13 I don't agree that chrome is more convenient, Firefox has better bookmark system, easy to use screenshots. Also, when you have a big number of open tabs, in chrome they are all just squeezed, in firefox they are not and you can still partially see the names of the tabs
I was a Firefox user from around 2009 and had been getting fed up with it over the last few years. The final straw for me is a bug which causes the Android version on Pixel devices to randomly lock up which causes the device to restart, loosing all tabs in the process. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, it can happen once a week or several times a day, its completely unusable. The worst thing is its been a known problem for some time and many people have reported it, however apparently Mozilla claim its an issue with Pixel devices and not Firefox, even though it doesn't happen with any other browser. So they're basically unwilling to even try and fix it, guess they just lost one more long term user.
I mean if the device actually reboots, chances are it is actually a device/system issue, and not necessarily something easy to work around. Possibly even a sabotage from Google, because they did such things in the past...
Don't have this issue at all on Pixel 7
Yeah. I had to remove Firefox on the 10 year old Android phone I have because it was causing the device to freeze or reboot (I forget). I was using LineageOS and had the latest version available for my phone (15.1) and no new version will ever be available for that device. Found GitHub issue (#14008) for mozilla-mobile and they said update your LineageOS. So everyone with an old phone that does not have an option to update cannot use Firefox. Mozilla could have easily fixed this, but they chose not to. No other browser that I can get on LineageOS has this problem, now I just use Chrome on it.
This might be an anti-competitive crowbar added by Google to make sure nobody tries to use 3rd party browsers.
Chrome has bigger market share because they abuse their power in android. In most mobiles chrome can't be uninstalled.
True, Chrome is glued into Android like IE/Edge are to windows.
@@Ramotttholl I mostly agree, but there's a nerdy thing I want to point out:
people who used windows for a long time surely familiar with "ie is a browser to download good browser" meme, they just download what they want and ditching ie/edge for good. they are aware that they have such option and care enough to do it.
meanwhile due to how phones are designed in general in all aspects it's hard to do something meaningful on the phone except for consuming this endless content on internet, from this comes the fact that phone users are not really smart comparing to pc users in this regard, plus you can't mess around normally with OS like in windows, you don't have rights even on android, I personally tried to remove google crap from os and rom just bricked, even though I was able to do it back in old android 5 days.
people around my age who used to phones having hard time to use the computer and I believe it's really concerning, I witnessed it myself when I was in college and it was IT section I was in by the way.
It was AMAZING until they decided "lets look like Chrome and shut down personalization and extensions"... they tried to "out-chrome chrome" and just pretend to be something else... and it SUCKED...
Sadly though... we NEED FIREFOX today. We NEED IT. There's almost NO other browser that's NOT Chrome under the hood- Opera, Maxthon, Opera, Brave, Edge, etc... ALL OF THEM are Chrome.
They shut down extensions only to make more stuff use...Web Extensions! WHAT??! :/
I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox. After watching this video, I think I’ll just set Chrome back as the default browser. I guess Firefox is my secondary browser now…
Well, if you do want your privacy just dont use chrome or firefox, use tor, best option for now
Used to be a hardcore Fx user, before they overhauled the way they did extensions and basically killed off my most-beloved extension (Vimperator, although Vimperator also died simply due to a lack of development effort). (I also especially hated the "minimalist" UI that Fx converted to.) I tried a few Fx forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox) but they weren't really satisfactory, so I went Chromium (SRWare Iron, specifically) for a few years, before returning to Fx again.
Been on it for a few years now, even on my smartphone, and if I need to use a Chromium/non-Firefox browser for some asinine reason, I use MS Edge.
I use Firefox. Privacy's not my main focus, although desirable, of course. I've been using it because it's more lightweight than Chrome. I've been considering switching to Brave and by now I think I've settled.
Firefox used to be the power user's browser, with feature sets other browsers didn't have. Now it just feels like Chrome, and if I'm basically going to be using Chrome, well... May as well use it. To their credit they did finally enhance their api to allow some of the most popular extensions to work again, but it took way too long. Any reasonable planner would have made an api capable of handling their most popular extensions a priority unless they had something similar built in, which they did not.
Mozilla foundation sucks. The only valuable aspect of Firefox is not being based on Chromium and still surviving.
Yeah, I agree with you, Mozilla back then did all the right things when MS was literally destroying the web, then to see them making deals with Google or advertisers or announcing they now use telemetry on your searches, wow. There is no hope.
a lot of the excess stuff like Pocket is what drove me to swap to LibreWolf earlier this year and i can say it's a much better experience and is truly privacy-focused while still feeling like Firefox (obviously because it's a fork but still)
Librewolf huh? I will look into it
I'm waiting for it to enter the stable stage. As soon as it stops being experimental, I'll use it
@@RudxainExperimental how?
@@Rudxainit's stable now
@@muizzsiddique It was still in "beta", last time I checked