I've been using Firefox as my primary on both desktop and mobile for about 6 years now, and it's usually pretty great. Desktop rarely has problems. On mobile there are a good number of sites with issues though, because devs don't usually test against it as has had a low number of users. But hopefully this revitalized movement to switch will make them have to care. And that said, 99% of the time these sites are still mostly usable, unless the broken thing is important like say a login screen 😅

I have been using Firefox since the release of Firefox 57 aka Firefox Quantum in 2017. I love the browser and most of sites run well in firefox. But there have been a few cases where I had to use a chromium based browser.

Firefox + Ublock origin is a great and awesome combo.

I also use Firefox on android. It is okay, but I sometimes feel it is slow at loading some sites. But it is not a big deal.

Unfortunately this is coming and a majority of people are going to happily step on to the train.

Think of it like this: 99% of all apps could have been just web apps in a mobile browser (Hell, a majority essentially are just a wrapped web app) but because of companies offering more/better functionality people choose to use the app.

All that needs to happen is sites starting require DRM functionality for "security reasons" so that the end user can enjoy more features.

A majority of end users don't understand the implications when making choices like these.

I was in dehi recently. Poverty is kinda nuts there, but I noticed everyone had phones, even people who obviously had no home. I assume kinda shitty phones, but it makes you realize a bit how important access is. If someone releases an iOS only app with no web version, they're basically saying fuck you to all those people.

Same same for this though. Googles saying "as long as you use our stuff you'll be fine, and why wouldn't you use our stuff because it's free! (Sometimes kinda sorta). And if you're stuck with something else for some reason, fuck you."

This new invention from Google has nothing to do with the browser you use. It is an API incorporated into, with Google affiliates and its own, web pages, which allows these pages to block any browser "for security reasons", when it does not have a Google Token incorporated, that accredits it as secure. That is, it is then Google itself who decides which browser is worthy to access the web. It doesn't matter which browser you use, or incorporate this Token in it, or forget about a large part of the internet and anyway about any Google page or service (Gmail, YouTube, GDrive, GoogleMaps, ....). This is the danger that the free internet faces, that Google decides which browser is worth using and which is not, being able to allow only Chrome itself as the only valid browser to access half of the pages on the network, and Game over for everyone else, Chromium, Gecko, WebKit or any other, without Google Token in it no internet, except if some geek comes up with some Fake Token which can be used (complicated)🤬.

@grafcube it's very important to push back against google's browser hegenomy just like we did back in the day with microsoft because now it's not just about one company controllin the software to access the majority of the web but the privacy of it.

Fuck google.

@grafcube @opensource @privacy

> But why do you use Chrome?

I can tell why I do. I used to use Firefox but had to move to Chromium long time ago for several reasons:

1. It was nicer on RAM on a very small machine I had at the time. I think Firefox got better in that sense since then.

2. Many web apps don't work quite well (or don't work at all) on anything but Chrome. That's a sin many lazy web developers make, and it forces their choice on the users.

@grafcube @opensource @privacy

Yaaay, time to really push that SearX/alternative-search-engine crusade, because there is more reason for a user to say "fuck you" to the hungry machine.

Yeah I'm completely over to firefox now. I can't help but notice firefox mobile is still a bit sluggish though but eh

Seamonkey (Mozilla browser/email/news suite) still exists! https://www.seamonkey-project.org/dev/

And there's even still a build of uBlock Origin for it! https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

There is still hope, if we keep the open tools alive...

Posted from freshly-installed Seamonkey browser with uBlock Origin :)

There is no internet without Firefox. There is an internet without Google.

Good article actually! I think non-tech-savvy people will also appreciate some kind of TL;DR

Edit: didn't know Codeberg can host static sites, definitely migrating mine there from Guthib!

Excellent write up. Thank you for doing this, I'll share with my whole family and friends.

If WEI proceeds, I won't have a choice of browser. Or operating system.

@grafcube @opensource @privacy Very good blog post. I use a fork of LibreWolf called FireDragon with all the settings I used to use on LibreWolf select including blocking fingerprint tracking, total cookie protection, and also multiple containers for sites. Cookies are only saved for sites I specify and the rest are deleted on closure.

I am fairly tech savvy and I willingly avoid using Firefox because I despise Mozilla. Thank you for your concerns.

I use Floorp, works pretty well and has the option to look like Edge which I really like

@grafcube @opensource @privacy I will make some comments to it, when I finished reading. I just want to say u already got some points wrong, Brave plans to continue supporting MV2 too, same for Vivaldi as far ik. Also DuckDuckGo's Browser are not chromium based too, they use the Systems Webview.

Edit: removed the info that Brave will not support WEI, since it got later mentioned in the blog post