With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
Oops, I switched 15 years ago,
I switch when it was Phoenix, then switch again when it was Firebird, and finally switch when it become Firefox
you win Firefox!
I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.
Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.
Hat trick!
Noob. I switched in 2006 - 17 years ago.
I cannot be 100% certain but I’m confident I was using it not long after the 1.0 release. That’d put me at 2004. 19 years!
Although I did briefly switch over to Chrome when it was new and fast. Then switched back when Firefox had a major optimization pass.
The early Chrome was crazy fast when it had none of the bloat.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/nCgQDjiotG0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What took you so long?!?
I had to pee!
Sorry, that’s 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!
10 to 15 years ago, myself. Don’t remember exactly.
Google has a web-browser?
I use Firefox since it’s release. It was never bad. I don’t get all the Chrome users.
I used it since netscape navigator XD
It has a pretty severe memory leak issue during the period where Chrome siphoned off most of its users.
Funnily enough - this article is 3 years old
Does it have native dark pages. Why I use brave. Would use Firefox but it’s glaring white
Firefox has dark mode.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.
As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userReddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
They won’t. The vast majority aren’t using any kind of ad-blockers in the first place or Google would go out of business.
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
expired
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
what are some necessary addons besides ublock?
Dark reader - for dark mode everywhere
Decentreyes - for avoiding CDNs that track you
Sponsorblock - to skip sponsored parts on youtube
Enhancer for youtube - for a nicer overall experience, specific quality setting by default, scroll wheel volume, and more
Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
Firefox’s sole income stream comes from them leading you into google search.
Well that’s blatantly untrue. Or if it is true, it must certainly come as a shock to the Mozilla Foundation.
Well, the last time I’ve looked into their financials it looked something like this(numbers are not precise, Im talking from memory, no way im diving in it again): The mozilla corpiration, which is a for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation, earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million dollars, with overwhelming majority of it coming from google, rest from yandex and baidu. They’ve spent most of it on firefox devs salaries and moved 13ish million to mozilla foundation, the NPO. The Mozilla Foundation itself earned somewhere around 13 mil, too, with about a mil coming from direct donations, rest from grants. They’ve spent it on evangelistic purposes, like on events in fuck knows where, stuff not directly related to firefox(vpn, vr stuff), grants to other projects (like rust), but mostly into managements pockets. None of that goes to firefox the browser.
As you can see, Mozilla is completely at a mercy of Google, especially after the deal with yandex fell through due to sactions. Otherwise, they don’t have nearly enough resources to keep up as is, nevermind losing 95% of revenue. There is a glimmer of hope for them pivoting into mozilla ecosystem, like with VPN and password manager, but I havent heard about those in a while, and the competetion is stiff there, but Im keeping my hopes up.
I have too use Edge at work. Is Edge also implementing this shit?
At work I guess you only do work related stuff, so at the end of the day it’s only work-related data that the browser has access to. Why would it matter to you?
99.9% of my the personal browsing I do is in firefox both on phone and desktop, but on work laptop I use Edge because 1. the work web-apps seem to favour chromium based browsers and 2. it’s not my data so I don’t really care about the privacy of my company’s data, they have a data privacy officer to worry about that.
Chrome does have a use, namely Selenium and automation.
I’m guilty of having Chrome on my PC, as I need to nerf over my favourites to Firefox.
Firefox is my browser of choice on my Google Pixel 7, but then again no doubt it makes little difference.
I just choose to use a VPN, so any targeted adverts are blocked regardless of the profile built up from my browsing habits.
You can use the Gecko webdriver for Selenium
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