
Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox (2018) - commoner
https://www.fastcompany.com/90174010/bye-chrome-why-im-switching-to-firefox-and-you-should-too
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17189396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17189396)

------
newscracker
Mods: this needs to be tagged 2018. This article is now a year and a half old.

 _> Google already runs a lot of my online life–it’s my email, my calendar, my
go-to map, and all my documents._

I’d rather the author take care of this with urgency, in addition to switching
from Chrome to Firefox.

Firefox Focus is one of the best things from Mozilla in the recent years. I
use it more than any browser (including Firefox itself).

I’ve asked around before, but didn’t get a satisfactory answer. Mozilla
Corporation (the one that funds Firefox development) gets more than 90% of its
revenues from its search partnership with Google. So Firefox is, in a way,
aligned to promoting Google to survive. If there were ways to fund Firefox
more widely (not through some limited VPN service tie ups), that could make
Mozilla bolder. Someone pointed out that while there’s an official Facebook
Container extension for Firefox, there is no official Google Container
extension. The Google Container is not created by Mozilla.

I’d really want to support Firefox (and related) development directly. In my
understanding this is not possible because donations on mozilla.org go to
Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on open web initiatives and
education.

------
kken
These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox
all the time, never switched to Chrome.

Why should I have switched to Chrome, again?

~~~
cbsks
When Chrome first came out it was much faster and leaner than Firefox. The gap
has closed significantly in the past few years.

I used Chrome as my main browser for a year or so before switching back to
Firefox. I’m glad that Firefox is now catching up again, hopefully developers
will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again. Occasionally I
will come across a website which was clearly only tested on Chrome.

~~~
hanoz
It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

~~~
zerkten
The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome
was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled
with lots of common utilities on Windows.

Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and
only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they
repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass
and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before.

My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use
problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better
now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera
giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.

~~~
tekknik
> Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing"
> and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they
> repeated the same mistakes of the past.

Not all developers. In fact I remember quite a few meetings where I couldn’t
convince product that Safari and Firefox should be supported and ended up
leaving the meeting yelling “Fine I’ll support them myself”. To this day I
still test in all 3 hoping one day I can stop testing in Chrome.

------
FillardMillmore
It seems like we've had a discussion about this article every few months since
its publication - not necessarily a bad thing, but just an observation.

I've been a Firefox user since before Chrome was launched - it was one of the
very few alternatives to IE at the time. And during these years, it was a
breath of fresh air. When Chrome launched, as others have noted, Google
leveraged its coffers to provide the new browser with extensive advertising
and PR and of course, the icing on the cake, it actually was a great browser
too.

I never ran benchmarks or anything but there were certainly a number of years
in which Chrome did seem like a faster browser. That said, I was always
skeptical because the browser was a Google product. But I stuck with Firefox
except for rare cases, mostly in the past 5 or so years, where certain sites
didn't even appear to function properly without it (it being Chrome).

Because of sites like these, I am at least appreciative that there are other
Chromium-based browsers (which now, apparently include Microsoft Edge) that
offer more or less the same site functionality as Chrome without having to
directly leverage a Google product.

I for one quite like Brave and its privacy features, including its defaults.
Blocking ads by default is great, though of course, Brave compensates for this
by presenting its own ads (which are still annoying, but less so to me). I
like the ability to use Tor and DuckDuckGo easily just by starting a private
window. It also seems to me that Brave is just as fast, if not faster than
Firefox. In addition to this, you can use almost every Chrome extension on the
Brave browser (for me, the important stuff is uBlock Origin, Dark Reader, and
a Password Manager). I know many here are skeptical or disapproving of the
'Brave Rewards' cryptocurrency - and I get that. But I have completely ignored
it (it is an opt-in system) and I am no worse for wear.

Suffice it to say, I'm a long-time Firefox supporter - I still do use it
somewhat frequently but I'm slowly shifting to Brave. I try not to use Chrome
(though I appreciate what its impact has been on the browser space as a whole)
and Microsoft's efforts with Edge at least provide amusing diversions. If
you're running old SharePoint sites, Microsoft's browsers are still a must-
have.

~~~
topmonk
> Brave compensates for this by presenting its own ads (which are still
> annoying, but less so to me)

I exclusively use brave on android, linux and windows and don't have
replacement ads. I've read that you can opt into viewing ads in exchange for
receiving a cryptocurrency token, but since I'm in a region that isn't
offered, have never seen it. But I don't think it just plasters its own ads
over the originals unless you opt into this “crypto for ad views” scheme.

------
saagarjha
> For instance, Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising
> networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites
> load faster. “As you move from website to website, advertising networks
> essentially follow you so they can see what you’re doing so they can serve
> you targeted advertisements,” Dolanjski says. “Firefox is the only [major]
> browser out of the box that prevents that from happening.”

Uh, Safari?

> Even if you do care, reading through Google Chrome’s 13,500-word privacy
> white paper, which uses a lot of technical jargon and obfuscates exactly
> what data the browser is tracking, isn’t helpful either.

Actually, I found it to be an interesting and relatively straightforward read:
[https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html](https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html)

> One downside to using Firefox is that many browser extensions are built
> primarily for Chrome

WebExtensions is pretty similar between Chrome and Firefox, isn't it?

> my password manager luckily has a Firefox extension but it often causes the
> browser to crash

!!

~~~
Scarbutt
Where is ublock for safari? ;)

~~~
saagarjha
If you're referring to my first point, I'm talking about Intelligent Tracking
Prevention.

~~~
inferiorhuman
You know a great way to prevent tracking? A decent ad blocker. I don't care
how good Safari's "intelligent tracking prevention" is, but as long as they're
blocking uBlock Origin I'll browse elsewhere.

~~~
Spivak
Safari isn’t blocking uBlock so much as they changed their extension API and
uBlock can’t/won’t rewrite to support it.

This is really no different than what Firefox did with WebExtensions but had
the advantage of being mostly compatible with the Chromium ecosystem. It’s
true that content blocking isn’t as powerful as what uBlock does/did with
WebExt but WebExt also isn’t as powerful as XUL extensions.

------
0xADADA
Switched back when [Firefox
Quantum]([https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-
firefox...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-
quantum/)) came out. Never looked back.

~~~
bootlooped
I looked back repeatedly. For one I could never get it to launch Zoom from a
link, it would always try to download the exe again. The Dark Reader extension
is much slower on FF than Chrome. I think Chrome is still faster in general, I
can tell especially when flipping through a bunch of tabs really fast.

When I came to the realization I was using FireFox essentially just for
idealogical reasons I went back to Chrome.

~~~
pivo
FWIW I use Firefox and zoom with no issues and am really happy with recent
updates to the browser. Haven’t tried the dark reader extension though.

------
shadowprofile77
My one problem with Firefox is that it's just so damn slow on any laptop I
use. I've tried every update since the beginning of 2019 and little
appreciable change on this. My laptops tend towards the cheap and they don't
have much kick but if Firefox is decent enough, it should be able to perform
as well as Chrome on them, and with Chrome I rarely have this problem on any
of the same machines. If anyone can give me some idea of how to address this,
would be nice.

~~~
i_am_proteus
I have had the opposite experience: Firefox runs just fine on a T420i (2nd gen
i3,4GB RAM, Ubuntu 18.04) a T450 (5th gen i5, 8GB RAM, Windows 10) and a 2011
Macbook Air (2nd gen i5, 4GB RAM, OSX Sierra).

------
cookie_monsta
Not trying to snark, but this seems like pretty basic stuff - is there
anything in the article that the average HN reader wouldn't have heard
multiple times already?

~~~
xxxtentachyon
Nope, but this article isn't aimed at HN readers. It's aimed at lay people who
don't necessarily understand what actions they're taking to implicitly
undermine their own privacy or jeopardize the future of an open, standards-
driven web. Katherine has written other, more innovative pieces around the
same issues: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-
recaptcha-h...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-
has-a-dark-side)

~~~
cookie_monsta
> Nope, but this article isn't aimed at HN readers. It's aimed at lay people
> who don't necessarily understand what actions they're taking...

So why is it here?

~~~
naniwaduni
An article can be of interest to HN readers without being aimed at them.

~~~
cookie_monsta
No doubt. But the reason why this one isn't aimed at HN readers is because
they've heard all of this multiple times already.

I'm not disagreeing with the article, I'm just wondering why it is of
interest.

------
rsync
I made this switch about 12-ish months ago when the writing was on the wall
about ad-blocking and ... something about auto-creating a "chrome account"
something something ...

I've been fairly disappointed in the lack of flexibility that firefox provides
and the real lack of maturity (and even usability) of the containers feature.

I think I expected the move to firefox to bring with it a lot more flexibility
and a richer set of configurations and customizations and this really isn't
the case.

Instead, my firefox experience has been surprisingly restrictive. Unless, of
course, I am willing to install a bunch of add-ons, all of which come with the
obligatory "access all of your data" and are from just some random dude on the
net.

Some specific issues:

\- I want to define a "home page" _BUT_ I also want _both_ new tabs and new
windows to open with a blank page. You cannot do this. As soon as you set both
new tab and new window to "blank page", the fn+opt+leftarrow shortcut ceases
to do anything.

\- I want to use containers. Containers are only tabs. That makes no sense.
The very first thing you want to do with a container, after learning what
containers are, is open a _Window_ and have all future tabs in that window
inherit the container that that Window is. This is the basic use-case of the
container feature and it doesn't exist. Instead, every use of container is
mouse-mouse-mouse-click-click-click (since there is no key shortcut for them)
and then open a _tab_ for a single use. We should be making container windows
and using key shortcuts to open tabs in those windows.

\- I can't force-title a firefox Window - it just gets the title of the
currently open tab. All manner of interesting Window management can be done,
outside of firefox, if you can lock the Window title. I could create 6-8 ffox
Windows, just like I create 6-8 spaces in GNU Screen, and quickly hotkey
between them ... I see no way to do this.

\- The fixation on tabs is, itself, a bit weird ... I don't think _either_ a
window-centric _nor_ a tab-centric workflow should be favored - they should be
equally developed and enabled.

~~~
Corrado
I mostly agree with these complaints. Containers are the thing that both
excited me and disappointed me the most about Firefox. I envisioned a world
where I could open a couple of different browser windows and have all the tabs
share a container. This would be great for things like working in multiple
Google accounts, or multiple AWS accounts. However I found that containers are
not very easy to use and I still don't know exactly how they work or which
extension I should be using to make them do what I think they should do.

My advice to Firefox would be to get containers working in a easy to explain
fashion and the world will beat a path to your door. I'm already using
containers to limit Facebook's access to my world; it should be just as easy
to use the same power for everything.

~~~
BuckRogers
You're absolutely correct. It's also true that you have to play around a bit
with the container addons to get it functioning as you'd expect, but please
believe that you're not alone out there on how you want it to work. For
example, my vision of containers was built out with the Containerise
extension. A version of that needs to be built into Firefox.

To do what you're asking, I haven't looked for addons to do it, but you'd
probably have to do it manually. Open a window, then open a container and
spawn everything else out from there. Assigning a container to a browser
window sounds entirely plausible, useful, and I like it.

There's only a few real use cases for containers that make sense or are useful
and that's a new one (to me). If Mozilla did that and duplicated Containerise,
they'd have yet-another killer feature.

I think Mozilla's biggest problem must be management or bureaucracy, because
they have a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit like this just waiting.

------
Tade0
The other day I wowed my iPhone using co-workers by showing that Firefox for
Android indeed allows you to install extensions.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
So does iOS Safari. Is the wow part specifically Firefox?

~~~
irq
> So does iOS Safari.

This is incorrect. iOS Safari allows for rudimentary ad blockers to be
installed. But no other sort of extensions are possible.

~~~
gnicholas
Actually, safari for iOS does support extensions other than adblockers. There
are action extensions as well, though they have to be actively invoked every
time you want to run them. This typically requires either 2 or 3 taps on every
page, which stinks. It’s also difficult to educate users about their
existence. But it’s technically an extension...

~~~
judge2020
Apple must have felt the "extensions that run on every page" would both A.
introduce a common browser pain point (really crappy extensions slowing things
down) and B. become dangerous to their users' privacy, since most things
Extensions would be used for also require some sort of internet connectivity
(eg. Grammarly - sending your text to the cloud).

------
lcall
I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power with Google, but, on
OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chrome derivative), so I see these benefits:

1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea);

2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs
open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those
sites where I need them (by exception only, and easy to do without a mouse
once the tab is open), and

3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it
from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a
different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a
privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to
implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations
of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably
also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),

4) Maybe the security of Chrome/Iridium benefits from Google's bug bounties. I
don't really know but I'm glad they try.

Given those things, are there still reasons I would prefer Firefox? (I am
aware of OBSD removing DNS-over-HTTP from Firefox, indicating that is a choice
that should be made by the user at the system level instead).

------
matt4077
There's nothing wrong with switching to FF, but I feel Google is getting an
awful lot of somewhat undeserved accusations. Specifically, lots of people
interpret all changes in Chrome as attempts to (directly) bolster Google's
advertising business.

This seems undeserved, considering Chrome has a track record that is rather
spotless in that regard: they didn't ban ad blocking, never even attempted to
send the click-stream into their user targeting, etc.

A lot more of Chrome can be better explained by a slightly different
motivating mechanism: Google needs to keep the open web at parity with native
software/apps, because it's the open web where they earn money. This is far
more important than any marginal change in ad blocking or whatever else these
conspiracy theories see as the upside for Google. This model perfectly
explains PWAs, for example.

Another under-analysed issue are the comparisons with Microsoft/Internet
Explorer's monopoly problem: The issue with IE was that it was closed-source,
only available on Windows, and included strange runtimes for content that no
other client had a chance to access.

 _None_ of those issues align with anything in Chrome's position today. Chrome
has a large market share, and to some extend the evolution of the web
platform. But with Chrome leading the way, the web platform has seen an
unprecedented success in terms of standardisation, performance, and features
in the last five years or so.

I get that people invested in existing standardisation process feel sad for
the demise of their bureaucracy. But it's working rather well because Chrome's
and users' interests align. And there isn't even an obvious mechanism for this
to change, since other players such as Apple seem to be unthreatened in their
position of having a de-facto veto.

~~~
kwijibob
I think Google love this kind of media exposure and promotion of Firefox. It
protects them from antitrust complaints and they are not too threatened by
Mozilla Firefox.

~~~
judge2020
There will possibly be a tipping point, especially if developers do the IE
thing (or now Chrome thing) and only test their sites on one browser;
currently a large portion of the education, private, and public sectors rely
on the word of their vendors for which browser their app works best on (mostly
Chrome because of its 10 year dominance). If all of the developers go to
Firefox, and the sentiment changes from Chrome to Firefox, we might start
seeing dual-install deployments and eventually firefox-only. That is, if
Google hadn't been pushing their GSuite offering for the past few years and
managed to tie a large amount of both private sector and education
organizations to Chrome for the integration and MDM.

------
amingilani
This topic's been discussed ad nauseam, I feel, but I made the switch a few
months ago. It's a little painful, Firefox' performance when it comes to
handling video is still sub-par, but that said, I'm much happier overall. The
performance loss isn't too bad, and Firefox's Containers is a much better flow
than Chrome's Profiles. I'd like it if MetaMask didn't glitch out with
hardware wallets so much on Firefox, but I can hop onto Brave for that.

That said, I checked a site I was developing on Chrome a while ago, and for a
moment, I thought I'd accidentally deployed to the apex domain. Thank goodness
I switched before Chrome's anti-features went into overdrive. I don't think
I'd be using Chrome when they did that, even if privacy weren't a huge concern
of mine.

------
chewz
I had been using Firefox during dark days and moved to Chrome (for other
reasons) more or less at the time of Quantum release.

Since Chrome 78 it is very perverse feeling to see Chrome informing me (with
cute little icon in omnibox) that it had blocked 3rd-party cookies from
domains like google-analytics.com or doubleclick.com.

[https://images.app.goo.gl/skf52r6Cndj7BvZp7](https://images.app.goo.gl/skf52r6Cndj7BvZp7)

------
18monthsin
I never switched to chrome. I find it hilarious that the author thinks the
decision to switch is forwardthinking enough to write about.

------
callekabo
Long time user of Firefox on desktop, but recently moved away from Firefox on
android after reading that it's "much more vulnerable to exploitation and
inherently add a huge amount of attack surface".

[https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing](https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-
browsing)

------
Avi-D-coder
The three reasons I can't seem to switch are tearing with compton and i3,
startup time, and middle click not pasting when clicking the new tab button.
Does anyone know how fix any of these behaviors?

The last one may seem minor, but it takes three clicks to achieve the same
result as chrome for a task I do constantly.

How is Firefox on wayland with sway?

------
eddhead
Been using the new Edge Beta for a year now, don't ever need Chrome for
anything

------
gaia
If you NEED extensions, you should consider Vivaldi. Chrome engine, but
doesn't require login to google and has better default privacy settings.

------
pantsme
Man I miss when chrome first came out and made the web so dang fast. Now it is
the heaviest app I have on my computer by far. We need a Chrome Lite.

I have been enjoying Brave lately though.

------
alex-wallish
It's incredibly disappointing to me to learn that the majority of Firefox's
revenue comes from promoting Google search. Maybe duckduckgo should build a
browser.

~~~
Groxx
2014-2017 was primarily from Yahoo, if that helps at all

------
JohnJamesRambo
I keep wanting to like Firefox but I prefer Brave right now. It seems like all
the ease of Chrome and ad blocking and privacy too.

------
lenkite
I will switch when Firefox supports the OS native certificate store for
client-certificate authentication. Until then its Chrome.

~~~
Yoric
I remember having this conversation with other Firefox security devs (I'm a
Firefox dev myself). While I don't remember exactly why they are not
supported, I remember that there was a very good security reason for this.

Also, while it's off by default, Firefox can be configured to support them:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1175296](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1175296)

~~~
lenkite
That method doesn't work for _client_ certificate authentication. Thousands of
organisations in the world generate client certificates for their users and
populate them into the OS certificate store. Those certificates are then
expected to be presented at the time of client-certificate authentication to
the hundreds of apps that expect them.

The OS certificate in any enterprise company is "locked down" with _extensive_
policies provided by the OS vendor. It is _far_ harder to import/export
certificate and key material from it than from Firefox's own certificate
store. I know that my company runs has scripts that run regular background
checks to validate certificates in the OS certificate store. If you want
dev/test certificates, we even have an internal app that generates 'trusted'
certificates for various purposes.

There was a _reason_ that Chrome chose to move to the OS certificate store.
They realised it would increase their market share in the enterprise. Firefox
is a no-go because it continues to cling to its own custom store.

------
joemaller1
Why not Brave? Honest question.

~~~
pmoriarty
Does Brave have anything like uMatrix and uBlock Origin?

That functionality is pretty essential to me, and I can get it on Firefox.

Other nice-to-haves on Firefox are: CanvasBlocker, NoScript, Cookie
AutoDelete, Textern, and Stylus.

If Brave has some equivalent functionality, I'm interested.

Qutebrowser was another alternative which looked pretty promising, but last I
checked its lead (only?) developer didn't have time to add the
uMatrix/NoScript-like functionality he had intended. So it's a no-starter for
me.

~~~
zamadatix
Brave is just one of the Chromium clones so yes. Not on mobile though. Firefox
on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though in that the current
classic version is a bit outdated and is by far the worst browser for battery
according to multiple test while the upcoming Firefox Preview rewrite fixes
this and updates the interface but doesn't yet support extensions.

Some people disagree with Brave's operating model options around Ads.

I'd recommend checking out Vivaldi as well if you haven't. It's a Chromium
clone with a proprietary interface (but written in web technologies so the
code is auditable). Outside of the usual Chromium clone story of being exactly
like Chrome without Google it has an extremely customizable user interface.
The downside is it has a disproportionate number of UI bugs compared to other
browsers but that seems to have gotten better since the 2.0 release train.

~~~
com2kid
> Firefox on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though

It supports uBlock, good enough for me.

It is the only thing that makes browsing recipe websites possible on Android!

~~~
microcolonel
The built-in ad blocker in Brave I think is missing some blacklists, but it
should get 95% of the ads that make websites like that unusable.

~~~
com2kid
Or I can use a browser built by an organization that is dedicated to
safeguarding freedoms on the Internet.

Using Brave seems like repeating the deal with the devil that all got us using
Firefox in the first place.

Also if Brave is just using Chromium under the engine, won't any shenanigans
Google gets up to in the Chromium code base pass on down to Brave? I'm still
not clear if Chrome's new anti-ad blocking stuff is going to permeate to other
Chromium browsers.

------
timwis
Chrome shares my IP address with the websites I visit?! :O (lol)

~~~
osamagirl69
The issue here is that it also shares them with Google, and in many cases
shares a history of websites you have visited with other websites.

------
helpPeople
Not sure why Firefox takes literally minutes to load a page.

Bugs are unacceptable.

Weirdly my wife has the same issue on her computer.

------
paul7986
it would be cool if DDG became Firefox's default search and or FF would
promote/let users know they have a choice!

~~~
microcolonel
But they need that Google cash to pay for the social political decadence of
the few, and the occasional productive development resource.

~~~
paul7986
I bet if they made DDG the default in which a big rev share towards firefox
was provided they'd be able to survive and more. Wouldn't be gangbusters like
it is now with the big G, but maybe in the long run it would.

------
nbst
“We put the user first in terms of privacy,”

What a joke. How quickly people forget that they installed extensions into
user's computers without their permission, and worse, didn't seem to realize
the consequences of what that meant.

~~~
quantummkv
Unless I am mistaken, the extension never collected any user data and phoned
it to a nebulous ad network. So user data still remained private

~~~
nbst
When a request is made to a server, the server creates a log of it. When you
interacted with the site that the plugin worked in tandem with, it requested
assets (JavaScript, images, CSS, etc) to Firefox-run servers. That's enough
for them to know you looked at that content and may have interest in it. Not a
huge deal in that particular instance but it's CERTAINLY not putting the
user's privacy _first_.

------
forgotmypw3
You're a couple years too late, Firefox has already been corrupted.

