People throw hate at it?

I left Firefox for Chrome about 12 years ago because Firefox had a major RAM leak. I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago after verifying they fixed the big and have never regretted it. People should use Firefox.

Yeah for real! They were really really quick and light on RAM in the super early days. But that was due to not having much there compared to Firefox and Opera, or even IE and Safari. Even the original Edge browser was kind of quick due to it just not having everything. All of them lose that little advantage after being around long enough to have the code base be added to along with trying to copy features from popular extensions or trying to add random things to stand out. Even when Firefox got heavy with RAM, I still stuck with it due to extensions factually being able to do more that I wanted. But then they solved the RAM issues dramatically with that Quantum refresh, though it did mean many extensions got nurfed by virtue of not having as much access to the OS level stuff (which is probibly a good thing with regards to security and privacy). Even then they still have better access to being able to really block ads and other privacy related things. And that is because they aren’t an ad company that wants to dictate how you are allowed to use the internet.

Spoiler: it fits very few company’s business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that “don’t be evil” promise, and most any other, is void.

Not too long ago I personally discovered their own AI had some interesting insight about this topic… https://sh.itjust.works/post/1176461

That is because they are a publicly traded for-profit company. They are legally required to do anything and everything to always make the numbers go up. By any means necessary, which is where any semblance of “not being evil” goes to die. Especially after a product/company was able to get massive popularity for doing/supporting actually good things and/or being known for being “the” name that people think about as being ridiculously well made. So many CEOs and the top controlling shareholders start gutting everything to squeeze out any and all extra profits. Just a hollow shell where massive cuts in jobs and replacing anything that got them there with passive money generating replacements. And since basically all normies just go with whatever they were last really told was good. They don’t notice how bad it has become, and don’t question it at all (like how many people thought those IE toolbars were just part of IE from an update).

Feel free to skip the next bit as it is more rant about the importance of actually updating the information normies have gotten and just default to.

I on a daily basis have to explain to customers who’s computers I work on, that AVG and Avast are beyond bad things to have installed these days. And that they (and really all the major paid for AV products) are the reason that their computer is dog slow. Along with pointing out that all the scary messages they are seeing are from the AV products trying to constantly up-sell them on getting every single one of their pointless products that they will never use/need. Especially bad when you pay for something and think that it will just do the damn thing you wanted without harassment. Just to then get more alerts and pop-up messages trying to scare you more into getting more “protection from X” than you got before giving them any money at all. They just keep using these things all because someone or a few “tech people” that they personally knew at work or before moving somewhere told them it was the best. Same goes for shit like Office and Outlook. So many older folks think they can’t use email if it isn’t through Outlook and freak the hell out if their drive or OS fucks up. They think they can’t create/open documents if it isn’t Office (same goes for Acrobat for PDFs). There are randomly people that do need those things, but they also tend to be more aware of stuff like creating backups of PST files.

Firefox really became awesome after the quantum update. It really is the best browser to date imo.

Agreed.

My personal browser history:

1. IE - came with Windows, before I didn’t really know what a browser was; we also had Mozilla, but only my dad used it
2. Firefox - as a teenager, I think I started at 1.5 and used until 3.5 or so
3. Chrome - it was faster than Firefox, so I used and recommended it to a lot of people; this is also when I started to care about web standards (tried to get IE users to use Chrome)
4. Opera - used for a couple years until they announced 15, which was going to be Chrome based
5. Firefox - I used Firefox off and on throughout, and remember the switch to rapid releases, and I’ve used it nearly exclusively (aside from Web Dev testing) since 2013 or so

Once Opera switched to Chrome-based, I started heavily recommending Firefox. So I saw the writing on the wall about 10 years ago, and now I’m stubborn about avoiding Chrome where possible. I hope others choose to switch too.

There is Firefox for Android. You’re still on Android, but you can have some control left.

Google has me by the balls anyway.

GrapheneOS? Are you on a Pixel?

Lineageos+microg is a useable de-googled android. I’m using it now without any google services.

But Edge uses pretty much the same software stack as Chrome, just with some other stuff thrown on top.

These days Chrome can be slower than other browsers. The days of it having a performance advantage are over. Still, it’s worth picking a browser that’s not based on Chromium, just to make it a little harder for Google to dictate how the web works.