To be somewhat fair there, side loading an app should really have a giant warning, otherwise it would be really easy to trick less knowledgeable users into installing actual malware. It would be nice to have an easier way to install third party app stores, but to install an APK from a website/browser really should have a giant warning.

Worlds better than the competition that outright bans side loading other than a weird "only x number of apps" and "must reinstall every x days".

Maintaining a browser is an insane amount of work. Without Mozilla working on Firefox, LibreWolf will stagnate and become unusable.

It genuinely sucks that some websites don't bother to support Firefox! When you encounter one, you might want to complain to the devs and open a webcompat issue.

I have already encountered some websites which didn't work with Chrome very well, but did with Firefox. They mentioned it's because of how Chrome now handles audio, the audio doesn't start.

I mean, it's not great, but it's also not the worst. You can also disable it. Chrome gets money by collecting your data to use for advertising purposes. Firefox doesn't do that, so I don't see much harm in them advertising some of their products a couple times a year. Even wikipedia advertises their own donation period, trying to encourage users to donate.

If it were a persistent banner, that would be different. But a one time closable window, that can also be disabled, is really not that terrible. Companies need money, after all.

Librewolf is a fork of Firefox, and is absolutely better for privacy and security; way more based than Firefox, you should check it out m8 :)

Here you go

Sorry to disappoint you but it does. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo if you check out the Browser section, it literally says DDG browser is using Blink, which is the Chromium engine.

duckduckgo browser is just a webview2 wrapper, which is a edge wrapper, which is just a chromium wrapper, which is........

They mandate the browser you use? Seems a little overbearing.

Could be worse: Your office could be mandating (shudder) Microsoft Edge.

It's a terrible mobile browser...

I honestly gave it a go, and I liked that I could run ad blocking, but the constant crashing and poor website rendering shoved me back to chrome on mobile a couple weeks ago. I'd rather deal with ads and have the browser be stable apparently.

There are extensions for gestures.

For such a good browser too!

It's actually 4%, see https://radar.cloudflare.com; websites like statscounter are not accurate because they rely on trackers blocked by Firefox enhanced tracking protection.

On desktop the market share is somewhat higher.

I switched back to Firefox ever since the Quantum release and have been loving it.

I wish Mozilla would spend their resources on the browser instead of wasting time and money on so many other useless projects.

Brave = chrome

Switch to Firefox period.

nope

Adguard is russian spyware. Also it wouldn't matter if they have a manifest v2 compliant addon as manifest v2 is going away in less than a year. Manifest V3 breaks adblockers.

I used vivaldi for a period, but it's still Chromium. I'm trying to support the only non-chromium option out there. The more users Firefox has, the better. Chrome and Chromium are so dominant, it's seriously problematic.

Unless you were running Firefx with outdated uBO filters, I doubt that. Vivaldi is a memory hog for me.

Firefox is actually a red panda. Which frankly are even cooler than foxes.

Chrome plating (less commonly chromium plating) is a technique of electroplating a thin layer of chromium onto a metal object. A chrome plated part is called chrome, or is said to have been chromed.

Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal.

If you didn't know, firefox has 'containers' where you can open a tab in, for example, a 'work' container and it won't carry the cookies over. Lets you log into multiple accounts on 1 browser (like personal email & work email etc).

Doesn't have seperate history though.

Honest questions: what data does Firefox steal and why Waterfox over others like Librewolf?

Waterfox was sold to system1, an advertising company. It also doesn’t immediately release patches that are released in upstream Firefox.

Use a hardened Firefox with the Arkenfox user.js

They pushed the deadline to January 2024, that's when Chromium is officially dropping support for MV2. As of now, new MV2 extensions can't be uploaded to the store. Built-in adblockers won't be affected by that change because they're not extensions.

It's not just about privacy, at least for me. Staying away form the Chromium monopoly is the biggest point.

Not sure why people are downvoting you. I agree with this sentiment. Results are better than DDG and even has bangs. They even have their Brave AI like Google's small pop-up boxes when searching for questions, etc.

I suppose Brave is a sketchy company itself, but I've read the privacy policy and ToS for brave, and I see nothing sketchy. It's nice and private, as search engines should be.

Just another bing frontend

What about DuckDuckGo on PC and Brave on mobile?

I use Google maps in a web app that my company has developed. Google maps is much slower in Firefox and Edge than Chrome. It's no accident.

Yes. Youtube is slow as absolute fuck on Firefox, both mobile and desktop.

Yup. They did away with the “Do no evil” mantra quite a while ago.

Yeah, I am a normal user, I don't do web development or anything like that so I'll probably hold off on a decision until the new manifest. Thanks for your input. :)

That makes a lot of sense. However, what if I said that Brave hasn't done anything to piss me off?

Pretty similar case here Firefox for everything but my primary anime pirate site doesn't work on Firefox mobile so the only time I use chrome is when I want to watch anime on my phone

Yeah, I'll definitely think about it web privacy is something I think about when I'm browsing so this is a big factor in my decision making. Though I've used Brave thus far, so may as well stick with it till chromium kills extensions.

On a side note, is setting up Firefox for privacy focused browsing difficult? I've seen in the past that you have to edit user.js files and stuff. If something like that is a one time thing then I'll probably think about switching, but if it's something I have to keep up with then I dunno.

The founder of Brave had previously been fired from Mozilla due to his homophobia. Firefox is the more ethical choice.

He also inflicted Javascript upon the world, which is... well, I almost want to say "even worse" but I don't want to make light of homophobia, so I guess I'll go with "also absolutely reprehensible."

I get that something like that might sway some people, and more power to you if you don't want to in any way support people like that. But It isn't going to affect me personally. I'm the type to separate the art from the artist, ya know? Plus there's more people making Brave than just that one person, so like. I dunno, this doesn't really affect my decision in the long run. I guess I'll just wait and see when the new manifest happens, thanks for your input though!

Thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. Though, I do get kinda skeptical when companies announce that their privacy focused, there's usually some sort of ulterior motive at work.

But everytime I open it I fear it's going to backdoor a cryptominer into my machine. It just gives that vibe.

I know right?? I know my data's going to get stolen one way or another, but Brave made me feel like I could potentially lose more than that.

Been trying out Edge and I got to say I'm pretty spoiled by having Bing chat on the sidebar as my coding assistance, except it's becoming more temperamental lately, refusing to answer simple questions and flipping me off by saying things like "I don't want to talk about this anymore" before terminating the chat.

Hmm, I see what you're saying but in my experience I have never had anything like that happen. But I get it, it's hard to trust big corporations like the one running Brave, and chromium as a platform.

Sometimes, simply changing the user agent string to that of Chrome is enough to make a site work again. For example Street View lags on Firefox, except when identifying as Chrome.

Some sites (notably Google ones) are notorious for implementing anti-competitive behavior, where if their website is visited other than a chromium based browser, it slows down or a functionality stops working.

I assume you're referring to Google meet (and the screen blur functionally), this is an open issue in Firefox for years, Google is using open standards to implement that, it's an issue in Firefox with how deadlocks work which is an extremely low level part of the browser. So it's not an easy solve.

There's a lot to complain about with Google, but this one isn't their fault. They use non-proprietary implementations and it's not their fault that Firefox will crash if they allowed Firefox users to use screen blur, the issue isn't a high priority for Mozilla.

Brave does something similar to containers. It let's you sort tabs into what are essentially folders. I really like it actually.

Alright, yeah maybe when the new manifest happens I'll be forced to switch but we'll see. I think for now though I'll stick to my usual browsing. Thanks for the input!

Also if you have a fast phone but hate intrusive ads!

I stopped being a fan of any recommendations once it became abundantly clear that I'm not actually shown things I'm interested in, but rather the same ads that everyone else gets. Not to mention the Google experience has greatly degraded lately. Tried their search recently? So many ads and SEO spam.

Guys I think I found one of the Google executives (/s)

Firefox is already perfect, no need to wait for Chrome to shit its pants.

Is that why uBlock Lite was developed?

Has v3 released already?

Four and a half year old article, and yet we're all mostly still blocking ads. I prefer to wait for the sky to actually start falling before I get all worked up about it.

wait you mean the streaming service

Bring us that horizon. 🌞

Proton Mail.

I'm gearing up to do the same soon. There is an encrypted email service I'm switching to (proton mail). I used it before, but hadn't fully bought into the off-grid stuff. I plan to delete my google account over the next year, and switch everything there. It's hard to untangle everything, but I've had my google account compromised a few times before, so it's time for it to go.

I know others have recommended Proton, but if you need something with standardized calendar/contacts support, I recommend Fastmail. Not quite as secure, but still infinitely better than letting Big G scrape your inbox.

Not the OP, but I have been using ProtonMail as my personal mail for a long time and it works really well for me.

I have equal feelings of appreciation and disappointment that I've not fully integrated with the hive mind

It's also run by crypto shills, and they got caught editing URLs to be referral links (!) a while back.

Login works for me in Brave perfectly fine, try just disabling the Brave shields for the website instead, it fixes like 95% of any website functionality issues.

That's not a Brave specific issue; I've seen it frequently on Chrome (desktop) and on Safari (mobile). In particular, I've observed it when attempting to post a comment; usually when that happens I need to copy out my comment content, reload the page, paste the content back in and hit the Reply button again.

I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing the cause has something to do with the Lemmy servers being overtaxed due to "Rexxit" related increased user activity. Of course, if that guess is correct, I'm afraid we can only anticipate the problem getting worse over the next several days.