Can someone remind me why we stopped using Firefox a while back? There was some piece of news that broke everyone’s trust, but I can’t remember what Mozilla did. Was it a change in their user agreement?
Firefox is essential for its various forks even if you have gripes with it
No, chrome came out and was that much better than every other browser at first.
Is it though?
I think OP is mostly focusing on why people switched off of FF. Present behaviour isn’t super relevant to the conversation.
Was
Operative word.
When Chrome initially came out? Not even close. Firefox was a bloated piece of crap, Chrome was slim and didn’t have all the bullshit that every other browser had.
Obviously, things have changed a little…
It was. It was crazy fast and lightweight at the time.
It gained massive market share.
It became the default development target for websites.
Other browsers started getting left behind.
Each step syphons users from other browsers, compounding issues.
The dev tools in Chrome were a revelation. I think Firefox had something similar (Firebug?) but the Chrome tools seemed better.
I never fully did, but I did end up using Chromium more than I wanted to:
- Some poorly written sites refuse to work with FF. My water company, for example. They eventually fixed it after I complained multiple times. Now they display a warning that it’s “Optimized for Chrome” but no longer flat out prevent FF from logging in (you know, to pay bills and such).
- FF Desktop still doesn’t support PWAs, and their recent update says they’re working on it, but they’re half-assing it (installed web apps will still have the menu bars, address, bar etc). I self-host a lot of web applications and want them to appear like native apps. Hence, Chromium.
- There was some recent ToS / Privacy Policy change, and everyone was knee-jerking “time to abandon Firefox” as if there’s anywhere else to go.
- A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster. That’s been a while, and I think when FF’s “Quantum” update (or whatever it was called) came out in like 2016 or 2017, it put it back on par.
#2 for me. The PWAs for Firefox extension broke one too many times so I gave up.
Good news - Firefox is actively developing built-in PWA functionality right now. There’s a discussion thread I’ll link you to when I find it.
EDIT - here you go, this also has links to further discussions: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561
There’s already a VERY early version in FF Nightly, but tbh it doesn’t yet really do anything you’d expect of a PWA.
Info on that: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561
A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster
Performance was huge.
I was willing to put up with a little jank from my browser because I wanted a diverse browser ecosystem, but Chrome felt much, much now performant. After I switched to Chrome, browsing felt noticably better.
A good while back, Chrome was superior. Faster yes, but also more polished and intuitive as browsers go.
Also, Google was “Do no Evil”, and Firefox was good, but not great.
Today, Firefox is still good, and Google is evil.
Times definitely have changed.
Also, Google was “Do no Evil”
At the time Google seemed awesome. Gmail was a game changer - a usable webapp that was better than maybe clients.
Firefox was good, but not great.
Firefox was the best of a bad bunch. It was so easy for devs to move to Chrome because the experience on every other browser was bad.
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That was the final straw for me, I switched over to waterfox for nominally more privacy.
Probably
I didn’t though, because the alternative would either be very small browsers with no or very limited addon support, or FF forks. And until now, everything Mozilla added was either opt-in or very easy opt-out. So hopping wouldn’t change much for me, except that there’s no LibreWolf nightly, and I doubt that self-compiled addons work there consistently.
I stopped using it and went to chrome bc my adblock stopped working and i waited for a fix but it didn’t come. It worked fine on chrome.
I went back to firefox bc my adblock stopped working but it worked fine on firefox.
these two events are several years apart if that wasn’t clear
Changing to opt-out telemetry from opt-in is the one I remember people fussing over
Don’t you mean Netscape Navigator?
There was some uproar when they essentially de-committed to supporting MDN/developer tools in 2020
…we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team…
Small suggestion: if you’re over 21 stop blindly doing what others do. Start questioning things and do what you think is best.
It was too noisy. My wife and I used to live in a small apartment. I’d leave my Linux box on all the time. Running Firefox, it’d periodically spin up the fan, which was loud enough to annoy my wife at night, and me during the day. Chrome didn’t spin up the fan. I switched and we stopped hearing my noisy computer.
This was a while ago. I can’t remember if it was Firefox or Mozilla at that point.
I am lazy and have yet to switch to a new fork.
Misinformation
I’ve been back to Firefox for about a year now. Left chrome for it.
Firefox is better than most but still smugly makes anti-user changes which are complete dog shit.
Remember when they turned off your ability to choose to load extensions that weren’t signed, because fuck you?
Fuck Pepperidge farm, I remember that shit.
Or how about DNS over https, because fuck you, user, why should you have any say over name resolution when you might use that power to block ads and malware?
