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If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Chrome is popular because it works. The average person is not going to give up convenience for privacy, even if they claim to care about it. As someone who uses Firefox, I can say that some websites don't work on Firefox and Firefox is often slower than chromium browsers. While I'm ok with that, others might not be.
Anecdotal experience is great.
I've never once come across a website that doesn't work in Firefox and find Chrome and Edge significantly slower.
I do think Firefox gets a degraded experience on some websites.
For example, Google Meet supports virtual video backgrounds and 3D face filters for Chromium based browsers.
And Google Search serves up an older results page design with fewer features to Firefox users. Someone has literally had to create a Firefox addon to make it pretend to be Chrome so it gets the modern results page.
I realise these are both Google-owned websites - but I don't think it's accurate to say that the average user isn't going to come up across these differences.
I regularly find websites I need for business to be non-functional or crippled. I use Chrome only for specific business needs. FF for everything else.
I use a web based platform for one of my business systems that does not work in other browsers. I don't care enough to have two browsers for personal and business because during work I also do some personal browsing/shopping. So I'm stuck with Chrome.
Pretty much every internal app for companies I've consulted at they never build them to work outside chromium. Learning site media often has issues. That's banks, insurance companies and government.
The average user uses what they know which is often what they have at work.
I see your anecdote, and raise you an anecdote of my own!
I mean mega.nz doesn't work on Firefox but that's about it as far as I've seen. And the reason that doesn't work in Firefox is because it uses some filesystem API Mozilla thinks is unnecessary and they can't be arsed to work with that. Or get the desktop app to work with Firefox, because that's broken too for some reason. ~Cherri
Chrome is popular because of marketing. Yes it works but I'm sure Firefox works just as fine for the average user.
Firefox has multi-account containers and chrome does not. That (mozilla-created) extension is their killer app for me.
regarding cookies which are fucking annoying...
you can install this:
https://consentomatic.au.dk/
(its supported by various browsers including chromium based, and firefox)
its open source, and made by some people at the university of Aarhus in Denmark.
you set the preferences and it automatically clicks your preferences, to the cookies, on the site(s) you visit.
its very much a "set and forget" kinda thing.
it doesn't prevent cookie tracking or anything. it just fills out the cookie-consentform automatically based on your preferences (so check those after installing)
threads.netcomes to mind. That annoyed me until I opened the console and saw that it was because of an infinite number of cross-site origin violations, at which point I lost interest in Threads.I use Firefox at home and chrome at work. I've never had a meaningful problem with Firefox that isn't roughly equivalent on chrome.
I've never ran into a website that didn't work on firefox but I don't consume content and go on websites that normal people like. My favorite sites are just giant textwalls.
I never had a website that didn't work on Firefox. It's probably just one of your addons that blocks something.
I've had issues with education based things not working on Firefox. It's probably anti cheating stuff that is set up to work with chrome and they don't want to bother with making it function on a less used browser. I had a problem using a government website on firefox too. I had to verify my ID to request some vet records and the ID verification required Chrome or Opera.
ID.me is certainly an experience, assuming that's what you had to use. I had to use it to access the IRS website once, and they made me jump through quite a few hoops to verify my identity. I was trying to login on my computer, but they made me take pics of my driver's license through a webpage link they texted to my phone.
So how do we make privacy convenient or get the average person to genuinely care about privacy or both? Can't do nothing... ~Cherri