At some point there were more than 1 relevant browsers using Gecko, though. Somebody at Mozilla decided to gloriously triumph over allies by killing XULRunner and not offering a replacement.

Not sure if WebKit is such a bad choice in that context.

It really is telling that even Microsoft don't find it viable to maintain a browser engine.

The "standards" are an absolute fucking nonsense, and boil down to "just do what Chrome does because nobody can stop them".

I've heard this over and over...

But people still aren't getting it (despite increasingly obvious signs this is already causing problems that will soon get much worse), so I guess we need to keep saying it

I just had to install chrome to book plane tickets. Kept getting an error on Firefox.

have any instance admins ever shared the browser stats?

Hi. I'm on lemmy. I haven't switched. Why? Because there an insane amount of incorporation into Google. Email, my phone communicating to pc, passwords, auto fill, saved cookies, credit cards.

I want to switch. I want to get off chrome from what I've been reading regarding it's practices. But I'm so engraved and the undertaking of switching is not something I've committed to yet. Or might never. I already have a Google Home in my kitchen. I feel like privacy isn't something I have a privilege of anymore.

They've got me.

The article mentions that "Chrome [has a] more restrictive Manifest 3 plugin API", but doesn't go into any examples, when this one is the main one (and why Google brought in manifest v3 at all).

Not strictly true. Firefox gets inferior support from cloud services, like Microsoft. Newer versions of their Web apps are not available on Firefox.

But there should be no downside. It's all artificial.

One thing I miss in Firefox is tab grouping. Yes there are 3rd party extensions that do that. But Chromium based browsers support that natively.

No, in my experience especially the Android version of Firefox is less smooth when playing animations or scrolling on older or lower end devices.

I really hope with the new Focus on Firefox mobile, that they will iron that out.

I have to use Chrome for...

1. Logging into PSN, since something in Firefox hard locks when I try it. I think it's to do with Firefox's password manager.

2. VR porn.

3. Some videos. Firefox doesn't support certain video types (namely HEVC/H.265) due to patent issues.

I prefer Fennec, Mull is too restrictive. I get the appeal, but I want some of the comforts.

Dunno if this helps you at all, but I've been using BitWarden to manage my passwords since I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox (both on PC and my Android phone). It doesn't fill passwords automatically in either case, but it's not much extra work to invoke BitWarden to fill those fields as-needed on either device, and it works very consistently. It's also (I'm told) much more secure. Just thought I'd share that here!

I've had this happen with obscure government sites that look like they were made in the 90s, I manually add the login & password for these

I would love tab groups

So I tried to find what tab groups are but most of the results are feature request threads so apologies if this isn't what you want.

Waterfox will soon be adding some sort of tab grouping feature akin to what tree-style-tab extension does. Here's the blogpost about it https://www.waterfox.net/...

Again I'm not sure if that type of grouping is what you're looking for but if it is consider watching out for the feature release. Longtime waterfox user and haven't had many complaints, Alex has quickly responded to the two issues I made in the github including a feature request that got added within a week (ability to unload tabs with right click).

Switched away to Vivaldi and Opera on desktop years ago due to better design and ability to swap between workspaces. Trying to migrate back to Firefox for ethical reasons. Desktop design still lags behind but privacy is great.

Been with the fox since before the quantum update. I never realized it was as obscure as it apparently is.

Years ago Firefox had a massive memory leak that would wind up crashing FX randomly or just crushing your system resources. The bug persisted for years. and I swirched to Chrome to get away from that poor experience. A few years back, a random community contributer, that was also fed up, dug in and fixed several issues responsible for the leaks. I remeber thinking that I should give FX a go again, but didn't until relatively recently.

It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.

Firefox on Android is fine, except they insist upon disabling about:config on the main branch of the browser for some damn stupid reason. You have to use a nightly or beta build to be trusted with your own config that much.

Personally, I ended up switching to the Fennec fork over this.

Yeah, it's alright.

You can install an ad blocker in it, so it's automatically better than Chrome.

With that and a few cookie popup removers, it's almost like the web is usable again.

with ublock origin plugin, it's amazing

Firefox on Android is great. I migrated that first before I actually migrated back to Firefox on desktop.

Using use daily. Only problem I sometimes have is the inability to upload images, so I just use duckduckgo's browser

Its ok but I regularly have to swipe the app away and re open it when it displays a blano screen instead of the website.

Yes. It used to suck, say, 10 years ago. My baseline was Youtube and Reddit (back then, okay?) Could I watch Youtube videos the same way as with Chrome or Android browser? No? Then, not ready. Did i.reddit.com open fine? No? Not ready.

Then it happened. And I switched and it has been wonderful ever since.

The only thing that I miss is the "pull down page to reload" gesture [EDIT: THANK YOU ALL! I'VE ENABLED IT - GREAT!!!!]. Not sure why Firefox hasn't implemented that yet. Patents? And also, when a video is in an iframe, it won't respect the "block autoplay" feature. The rest is dandy.

For me it is great on a smartphone but pretty underwhelming on my android tablet. It doesn't scale websites properly on the larger screen and doesn't support a tab list on top anymore (like Firefox on desktops).

Works mostly great. Addons like uBlock Origin and Super Agent (auto reject all cookies) is great for your mobile experience.

I noticed Youtube site sometimes has weird framerates. But since Google removed premium lite subscription, I refuse to use the Youtube app and just view with uBlock in browser, even with the framerate issues.

It's great but they are two, reported, bugs that annoy me.

First, it sometimes gets stuck half way between dark and light mode.

Second, sometimes it gets stuck starting to load a page. The webciew gets stuck but not the chrome. If you switch tabs the same page will appear. If you enter a new page it will never load. A force close fixes it but it's annoying.

Using beta is imperative since it enables add-ons . However the bugs are also in stable.

It is my default. I use ublock and Dark Background Light Text extensions. And the reader view is better than any chromium phone browser.

I am, sometimes there is an issue with videos in Fullscreen, where the video plays just somewhere to the top and off screen, besides that it's fine.

I recently made the switch. Make sure to install whatever add-ons you need, turn on the "open links in apps" setting, and turn on the "pull to refresh" setting. Import your bookmarks and you can still use the Android password manager. It's not 100% as smooth, but it's pretty close.

Given Google and YouTube's history of intentionally and maliciously disrupting other browsers that aren't chrome, it'll be a safe bet that it's intentional.

On my pc with a couple ad blockers youtube is SLOW.

If i turn them off it runs fine.

On my android using adaway I have zero youtube lag.

So yeah. Seems pretty intentional

I think youtube makes itself terrible if you don't have premium. I have the problems you describe and others on both my desktop with FF or my chromebook with chrome.

Yes, but I've had it across multiple sites that play video, so I don't think it's youtube.

I’ve heard this but it hasn’t happened to me.

On mobile I only use New Pipe for videos. Admittedly, I don't do much YouTube but I haven't noticed any problems on my laptop.

Mozilla in general honestly is pretty awesome ngl

They have this nonprofit called Privacy Not Included that rates companies/products based on how much they respect user privacy.

Modern cars collect literally everything they can about you. Low key kinda scary yo

Privacy Not Included

I use Ungoogled Chromium exclusively for YouTube, cause my graphics card csn upscale videos and convert them to HDR, but not in Firefox. The moment I get those features in Firefox, I'm done with Chrome for good.

There's a video service my therapist uses that refuses to run in Firefox. I expect it probably could, but it's a lot less work to just launch chrome for that one use case.

Extensions are your friend My new tab has all my sites pinned. Have a look at the add-ons I am 99% sure what you want has already been made

Host it on Netlify or something similar, it's free.

I never got this whole "speed" argument.

I never had a lot of difference between both browsers (never got to use chrome much, admittedly), but even when it was supposedly "bad", Firefox never struck me as being especially slow.

Was it a windows thing or what?

A lot of the privacy aspects mentioned in the article would apply but the extra features(like facebook container) would not. The extension support is also an issue since the extensions themselves have their own privacy policies, so if you get any which are hosted on google owned chrome web store all your privacy cautiousness goes down the drain unless you're using a vpn.

Firefox addons also have their own privacy policies but you can simply choose the ones with open source licenses so it should be rather simple to be more protected.

Even Brave uses Chromium as a launching point before all of its customizations.

This in turn gives Google control over web standards because if they choose not to support something or if they implement it in a particular way they effectively govern it's adoption because of their near universal market share.

I'm sure I missed a lot of nuance but this is my best take at explaining it.

What was the downgrade in usability you saw? I used to be an avid chrome user turned Firefox, but I would say the opposite.

Sync works great over here. It even syncs history which is great because I use an extension on the laptop to limit history to 28 days and that becomes synced with Android without an additional extension.

Just log out and log back in, and make sure you use the same account on both machines .

Forgetting politics, I liked Brave. But sometimes they do seem a little shady. I'm loving Librewolf even more, though there's no Android version. It does sync with Firefox and Mull though.

Ah, the new Internet Explorer.

Did you read the article at all?