The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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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
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.
you win Firefox!
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!
10 to 15 years ago, myself. Don't remember exactly.
Sorry, that's 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don't make the rules!
Google has a web-browser?
I use Firefox since it's release. It was never bad. I don't get all the Chrome users.
It has a pretty severe memory leak issue during the period where Chrome siphoned off most of its users.
I used it since netscape navigator XD
Does it have native dark pages. Why I use brave. Would use Firefox but it's glaring white
Firefox has dark mode.
Funnily enough - this article is 3 years old
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.
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that's on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
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.
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 user
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.
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.
Aged like fine milk
i use 5 browsers 3 of them are based on firefox
2 years later, the "Manifest" is doing it's job and still I know some people that would not leave their favorite Chrome.
which manifest?
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.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven't found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don't want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
I think this might be what you are searching for. I've used it a few times and it does everything it promises imho: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete
It's ironic that there are over 60 blockable elements and such over Privacy Badger and Ublock origin on that page.
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.
As someone else mentioned they have several browsers and so do I. I actually do google stuff in chrome and microsoft stuff in edge and would do apple stuff in its browser if they did not mess up the login stuff. then my firefox is my real browser.
You can use the Gecko webdriver for Selenium
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.
No, at work I regularly do non work related stuff. Also when doing work related stuff I prefer to use firefox as I can use adblockers.
Having said that I understand that I’m using work supplied laptop and if they force me to use Internet Explorer than that’s what I have to use.
Having said that it’s not so important as for my personal browser.
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.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993
50 States, 50 Protests, 1day
Feb 5 @ your downtown.
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