I’ve been hearing more and more about Firefox lately, which seemed to coincide with many users migrating from Chrome. Have there been any major recent changes to the latter which have caused this migration?
Edit: Just installed Firefox and man has it come a long way since I last tried it on Android years ago. Even has ublock origin, page sync with desktop… I think I’ll switch for the next couple days and see how I like it on desktop nowadays.
I remember switching from Firefox to Chromium back when it first came out. Nice to go full circle.
YouTube anti-adblock, Web integrity, mainfest v3, just to name a few. Things just slowly add up and most won’t just stand there and take it
most - I’d venture to guess less than 1% will take any action, unfortunately
Google threatening to take away the ad blockers was enough to make me go back to Firefox.
Manifest V3, Web Environment Integrity, YouTube’s recent war on ad blockers.
The main issue is that now people just test their shit against Chrome. Maybe Safari if they’re feeling generous. There’s a few bits in Firefox Android where things just work a little bit less smoothly than they do in Chrome, and needing extra presses to work in FF. Not sure why, maybe Chrome is making clickable targets that little bit bigger or something.
i used opera on mobile and opera GX on my PC. switched back because of security and privacy concerns. i did not miss any major features, firefox really has become the best browser.
People are becoming more conscious of stuff plenty of us have been aware for quite some time already. The idea that a browser made by a corporation who harvests your data for the purpose of advertising doesn’t give a shit about privacy and will try to block adblockers is not something some people weren’t expecting - but normies are getting this shoved in their face with YouTube giving them the anti-adblock notification.
Firefox (and it’s clones) is basically the only other choice - all the other (major) browsers (that aren’t Safari) are based on Chromium, which is developed by Google.
For me it was performance. Google Chrome consistently couldn’t handle the tab loads I would put on it after around 2022, despite my computer not really showing signs of degradation.
Since switching to FF, I can run the same amount of tabs with almost not hiccups or stuttering - what I’d experience with Chrome. Hell, Chrome would crash randomly and I’d lose all my tabs and would have to reload them.
Plus, sometimes to fix Chrome’s poor performance I’d shut the program down entirely, upon re-launch the browser wouldn’t even remember all of the tabs/windows I just closed (it used to). So, if I was doing research on something, Chrome would just not open certain windows back up after a hard reset, even if I CTRL + SHIFT + T and I check history. Madly infuriating.
FF opens all windows and tabs upon hard reset, no questions asked. Plus, the compatibility between PC and mobile is awesome: I can load up a tab from my phone that’s on my PC super easily, which makes things useful for when I want to share web content with friends or family.
I seem to have woken up from my slumber of tolerating Chrome, and chose a better service instead.
I can’t notice a difference on Mac OS using a trackpad, but maybe it’s different on other platforms.
Got a “disable your adblocker” popup on that article. The third bullet point in the article is about reducing annoyances like ads. Ridiculous.
The site owners have different values and notices than any one writer or journalist. The problem with ads is they became too intrusive. So ad blockers block all, including on respectful websites. It’s better for consumers to block all, but journalism does with no revenue and most don’t want to pay. We don’t yet have a middle ground.
Somebody should make a standard for non-intrusive, not spying, ethical ads (no clickbaits, no contrasting colors, related to the article, etc. etc.).
Adblocks would have websites that strictly follow these guidelines in a whitelist by default (opt-out).
That’s the middle ground. But, I doubt any big ad company like Google or Meta would push for it, if not against.
Adblock Plus did something similar to that.
Then it turned out they were taking bribes to whitelist some providers and then we’re back to square one.
Oh well.
For anyone who is unaware, Firefox developer edition on mobile, otherwise known as Firefox nightly, never lost the ability to arbitrarily install extensions. You just need to make your own collection on the Firefox website, and link it in the settings on your phone.
There are also Firefox forks, but you have to install apk manually and then extension are easy to download without developer collection
I have fennec f - droid and can’t find how to download them easily. What fork are you using?
An about:config toggle to enable unoptimized extensions on your own risk, would still have been nice.
Even now, i see no chance for niche extensions who would work fine on mobile, to be enabled.
https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
The option to install any extension has always been possible it’s just a tad more work to get setup.
I did this ages ago, I just add the extensions I want to the list and then they appear to let me install them
Long time Firefox user here. I’m pretty excited about this
