In every comment thread about the importance of supporting Firefox, there’s always at least one comment claiming Firefox is slow, even while I repeatedly see the data say otherwise.
Anecdotally, I’ve used Firefox, Waterfox, and Librewolf on PC, and none have been slow.
I’ve used Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Fennec on Android, and if anything they seem faster and easier to use than Chrome (and they actually tend to work like an actual internet browser).
I’m not saying these commenters are all Google sockpuppets, but maybe they’re parroting misinformation, or maybe they’re using an Apple OS iOS, where Firefox is basically Safari.
It’s just really perplexing to me.
I think it depends on the website. There are some websites where chrome will work better either because chrome works better with certain libraries/technologies or because the developers put more time into optimizing for chrome.
On the other hand Firefox might have less bloat around telemetry that gives it an advantage too.
Oh absolutely true, and one would probably notice it more if one uses a lot of Google’s services (though Microsoft is even worse in my experience, with nerfing its services if you don’t use Edge), but this still doesn’t explain why just a normal user would proclaim Firefox is “slow as fuck” without anything to support this, and that’s what I’m seeing in nearly every thread that mentions Firefox.
If you want to online shop or research something to buy, or spend money in some way, Chrome and Google search is superior. If you are looking for information, news, anything not requiring payment, Firehox and duck duck go are the best
I’m going to have to strongly disagree here. Trying to research a potential purchase on Google or Bing will net you page after page of Amazaon Affiliate sites peddling junk. I’m into longboarding, and most of the results you’ll find trying to Google a decent longboard would result in wasting your money at best, severe injury or death at worst.
It’s not just longboards, either. I’ve noticed these promoted results trying to search PC parts, appliances, dog food, tools, and anything else you might be looking to buy.
There’s a reason people started appending searches with “reddit,” but honestly it’s better just to use a search engine that doesn’t net you these results, or ask somewhere else entirely like a community forum. Sadly, most people rely on results from search engines and will end up spending money on junk.
I’m also not sure why using Chrome would make online shopping easier. I literally make all my online purchases through either Firefox proper or Fennec, and I’ve never had a problem.
Yeah I’ve noticed the same thing. I’ve been deliberately trying to do a bit of Firefox advocacy for a while (cos I honestly believe increasing its userbase is our only chance to avoid google ruining the internet). But yes every time there’s a bunch of people confidently complaining about how bad/slow Firefox is and advocating for brave or chrome.
Initially I thought it was just a bit of historical baggage but it happens very consistently and aggressively so I’ve had the same thought.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using Firefox for ages and have never experienced the problems these people keep complaining about.
There was a brief time when Chrome ran better than Firefox on an old 512MB laptop I had, but Chrome has since become an infamous RAM hog. Firefox is the lightweight one now, and has been for quite a few years.
Worth mentioning that, as much as it pains me to back Apple, Safari is also a good alternative for those it’s available for (at least in this regard). It’s one of the only browsers other than Firefox not using Chromium. And WebKit, it’s renderer, is a pretty badass project.
Chromium and its forks actually all use WebKit as well: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome/
WebKit: Rendering engine shared between Safari, Chromium, and all other WebKit-based browsers.
Is this up to date? I thought they forked from WebKit ten years ago.
Blink and WebKit completely diverged in 2013 after the fork. That document is virtually identical to its 2012 version and is marked as outdated in several places.
I think some people also just haven’t used Firefox in a while, and it’s gotten better since the last time they used it. I’ve never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it’s buggy and slow, but she hasn’t used it in many years.
I’ve noticed a lot of people not wanting to ever revisit older paradigms. Like when the Reddit protests started a lot of people were adament that going back to forum type software would be a disaster and I felt taken aback. I loved that shit. The only reason I saw to do that with Reddit instead of a dedicated forum was because Reddit already had users that could wander into your community and slowly onramp. Here on the fediverse we get the best of both worlds, but there are people who hate the idea that !news@ttrpg.net and !news@lemmy.world don’t aggregate together even though they might actually be about completely different subject matter because “we don’t want to go back to the phpbb days”
Well y know what? Maybe there are parts of the phpbb days that were worthwhile and good. Maybe hosting dedicated servers that are specifically about something is a positive thing as it makes there be more people excited to host a small part of the internet that people can make use of. Maybe what we needed was the easier on ramping, not the centralizes forums.
I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it’s “soooo bad”. If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
I love GIMP’s UI. It’s clean, it’s to the point, and it’s stayed basically the same for ages!
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I’ll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn’t help.
Instead, I’m generally met with an “oh, this is nice”, before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
I’m a huge fan of open source but saying the only people saying Gimps UI is bad are astroturfing is insane.
It’s famously controversial and uses UI paradigms that don’t exist in any modern desktop environments.
I’m not, but it’s not like it’s an occasional thing. Every time it’s brought up, it’s trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they’re useful idiots.
It’s balanced to say “great program, but could do with a UI improvement”. It isn’t to say it’s unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
“Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing.”
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can’t seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn’t going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
People seem to be unaware that Firefox on Android (not IOS unfortunately) has support for several useful extensions. Ad blocking is the obvious benefit, but I use a Text-to-speech extension every day.
Firefox for iOS might switch to their own engine if Apple relaxes the rules on web browsers. New EU laws will put full pressure on Big Tech.
This was true when Chrome first came up, they even made those ridiculous ads, which Opera (before they stopped developing their own engine) was ridiculing: https://youtu.be/zaT7thTxyq8
Firefox after they they rewrote their engine to be multithreaded (I think it was called project electron?) is faster than chrome that is currently very bloated.
What saddens me the most that, while there are ignorant people who don’t know better and use what are they familiar with, there are also self proclaimed techno geeks, who are equally ignorant and don’t seem to remember the times of Internet Explorer.
Edit: here are the chrome ads: https://youtu.be/nCgQDjiotG0
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Tbf we’re in a new generation of techno geeks who weren’t around for a lot of things and lack the full context. I think about that every time a young person chides me for “stealing” from YouTubers or even Google itself by blocking ads.
I(31/m) have a buddy(25/m) who gives me shit for pirating stuff sometimes because he says I’m stealing from the creators. But I’m not because I wasn’t gonna pay for it in the first place 😂 I’m more than happy to pay for things and do all the time. I just cancelled my audible sub a couple days ago because I got an email that my credits were going to expire and I needed to use them soon. Like what? I paid you for those. So I just used them on the series I’m currently listening to and spent the rest of the night figuring out how to host my own audible 😂
By some metrics, Firefox surpasses Chrome now.
On top of that, Firefox was recently found to be faster than Chrome.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Google.
I switched back and forth between Firefox and Chromium based browsers like Brave and Vivaldi. To be fair Firefox felt slow in comparison for a long time but that changed in the last few months. I think since about Firefox v114 I don’t feel a difference anymore and that’s why I’m using Firefox now. Best is to tell those people to try Firefox again because it recently became faster (in my experience).
Have been using Firefox forever basically, with a brief departure when Chrome was fairly new, but later returned.
What part of this can be used for DRM? It looks like its just a crypto-graphically provable User-Agent, assuming I’m reading it right. Am I misunderstanding?
Sounds like it is a technology that is taking control over your own computer from you i.e. DRM.
Why is anything like this needed?
The proposal’s explainer dances around the fact that it can be used for that.
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
- Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
- Users want to know they are interacting with real people on social websites but bad actors often want to promote posts with fake engagement (for example, to promote products, or make a news story seem more important). Websites can only show users what content is popular with real people if websites are able to know the difference between a trusted and untrusted environment.
- Users playing a game on a website want to know whether other players are using software that enforces the game’s rules.
- Users sometimes get tricked into installing malicious software that imitates software like their banking apps, to steal from those users. The bank’s internet interface could protect those users if it could establish that the requests it’s getting actually come from the bank’s or other trustworthy software.
Combine them and you have an anti-adblocking feature.
It also says
How does this affect browser modifications and extensions?
Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality: E.g. if the browser allows extensions, the user may use extensions; if a browser is modified, the modified browser can still request Web Environment Integrity attestation.
Which is a whole lot of nothing. Of course you can still install extensions and sure, it can still request attestation, but that doesn’t mean it will get it. But this isn’t even important because I’m sure attestation for being a human (case 1) will fail anyway if the ads get blocked.
But even assuming that it doesn’t interfere with ad blockers, this is still going to allow some shitty website to query code running on your device that isn’t under your control to snitch on you. It’s fundamentally stupid and wrong to trust any client data about the client, using extra processors and features is a garbage, intrusive workaround that still doesn’t even actually work reliably from the shitty developers/website owner’s point of view. Also see: Android custom ROMs and the lengths they successfully go to in order to run banking apps.
@uthredii It’s kind of interesting that this is coming out after Ai stuff like chatgpt and dall-e came out. iirc, those tools scrap a lot of data from the internet from all places [main reason why twitter had it’s rate-limiting, if it’s true and not bullshit].
I get that scraping is pretty bad, but putting drm on everything just isn’t the right way to go about it. It’s like nuking all forests to destroy mosquitos; the mosquitos will die, but so will everything.
