It's hard to reconsider firefox or safari because they are also very much anti-user. Maybe a fork of firefox/chromium without all that anti-user stuff would be better, with plugins only click-to-play, with no autoplay for animations, with a quick way to toggle javascript in a tab, etc. But there is no such fork.
Could you elaborate on some anti-user stuff that Firefox and Safari do? I'd like to know. I do consider Firefox comparatively more open than Chrome though, so I may have my biases.
I'm Firefox user, but I consider it the 'lesser evil', not the only good guy. The anti-user stuff in Firefox is:
- forced bundling of pocket/readability,
- forced bundling of hello,
- forced and heavyweight extension signing (I understand them wanting to sign extensions in user profiles; but the extensions installed by root should not need that - this killed the config extension for FreeIPA, for example),
- I understand their desire to change their extension model, but killing many popular extensions is not a way. How it was communicated was a great example of hubris,
- DRM support should not have been the default choice,
- but MSE WebM with VP8 and VP9 still doesn't work,
- the Australis redesign was controversial.
(And from personal interest standpoint: still no Web Components support? still no WebP?)
Those are really great points you brought up. They went to the back of my head after all these years.
I think they dropped Hello altogether.
Extension signing is not forced though, can be toggled from about:config.
In my opinion WebExtensions is a last ditch attempt to gain users and devs. If FF abandons XUL, WebExtensions will be the ONLY STANDARD way to write extensions. But in their defense there are active discussions about adding new APIs to enable more powerful integrations.
DRM is off by default on fresh installs, AFAIK and is user toggleable in Preferences unlike being hardcoded in Chrome and Edge.
Firefox no longer includes Hello. Hello only used standard WebRTC APIs, so anyone could create a comparable service as a regular website, such as Talky.io.
Extension signing can be disabled in about:config, but I think the pref ("xpinstall.signatures.required") only works in the Firefox Nightly and Developer Edition channels.
EME DRM is enabled by default in Firefox, but it won't work until the DRM blob (Google's Widevine CDM DLL) is automatically downloaded about one minute after Firefox launches. Here are instructions for disabling EME DRM and uninstalling the Widevine CDM:
> Extension signing is not forced though, can be toggled from about:config.
Unfortunately that is no longer true. Their argument was that users could be tricked to disable it, or run extensions that disable it. So to cater to the lowest common denominator user they completely removed the option for all users of Firefox.
The alternatives are the non-Firefox (unbranded) Firefox builds or using an alpha version of Firefox (developer version).
Thanks for the information. I've been running only Nightly for over a year now and hence my misinformation. That logic does seem sound though but would be better implemented if any change to any preference that's not visible in the Preferences section raised a notification about it. I think I'll add this to Bugzilla.
Not OP, but I tried both FF and Safari recently hoping they would reduce the footprint. FF ended up being way too slow. I stopped using Safari after a few minutes because they decided to not show favicons on tabs anymore and you can't enable it at all. How is anybody supposed to find the right one of the 15-20 tabs that are open. Insanity!
i agree; no tab favicons is upsetting. they do come back if you pin tabs (so only the icon is visible), and i'd say apple wants you to do the "zoom out beyond maximum" gesture to show all pages for navigation. i don't really use tabs when i have many open any more, because they go off the edge of the screen pretty quickly anyway.
safari is also incredibly fast compared to chrome and ff. i love ff, but since starting to use safari i honestly don't think i could switch back
It's simple, really, all of them prioritize the ability to show ads over user experience, privacy and security. For example, animations hurt user experience pretty much all the time, and yet they are not click-to-play.
