this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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It is essential to stop using Chrome. Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware. (mastodon.world)
submitted 2 years ago by Live_Let_Live@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Lodra@programming.dev 8 points 2 years ago (12 children)

Serious question. Is it actually better for the typical user? I don’t mean people commenting here. I’m thinking about the majority that don’t care about privacy, blocking ads, quality technology, etc. for those people, I’m guessing that Firefox is equivalent. Just another browser that works fine. So why switch??

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 years ago (8 children)

I run into compatibility issues and weird bugs with firefox a lot. I'm still using it as my primary browser, but I have to keep a chromium based browser ready for times when a website won't work in firefox. I can put up with that personally, but I wouldn't want to set up firefox on family/friend computers because I don't want to get a call whenever something doesn't work and they don't know why.

Chrome based browsers also have some super useful features (like tab groups) that firefox doesn't have a good alternative for.

[–] FutileRecipe@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I run into compatibility issues and weird bugs with firefox a lot. I'm still using it as my primary browser, but I have to keep a chromium based browser ready for times when a website won't work in firefox...

Got any specific examples you don't mind sharing? I can't remember the last time I ran into this.

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Most recent one was visiting https://www.lifetime.com/playsets on Firefox mobile. After going back and forth between the list of playsets and individual playset pages, Firefox stopped loading the list of playsets. I would load in most of the page, but the actual product list wouldn't load. Refreshing and restarting Firefox wouldn't fix it, but the page loaded fine in brave browser so it didn't appear to be a server issue.

Before that one, I had a time where Firefox mobile was completely broken by an update for like a week. Wouldn't load any web pages, reinstalling/resetting user data/etc wouldn't fix it.

I've had websites break on Firefox desktop too, but I don't have any specific examples I can recall right now. I definitely run into more issues with Firefox mobile than desktop though.

[–] FutileRecipe@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I definitely run into more issues with Firefox mobile than desktop though.

Ah, mobile. I don't use Firefox mobile due to its insecure status, particularly lack of sandboxing:

Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.

Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

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