I switched to Firefox (for personal use) a few months ago, away from Chrome, and plan to keep using it for the foreseeable future. As for work, I use Edge because business account. My main reasons for this are: Chrome / Google has way too much dominance over the internet. Doing things like throttling YouTube is shady af. The going-away of Manifest v2. The internet in it's current form is virtually unusable with all the ads and cookie trackers. Ublock Origin (and others like it) make the internet just about tolerable. Especially for YouTube if you're not paying for Premium (which just went up in price by 60%). I appreciate that Firefox's proxy implementation has never been tied to the system proxy. I've got some gripes though: While Chrome is a memory hog, Firefox absolutely craps the bed if you open a lot of tabs in a short period of time. Built-in translation is hot garbage. I know it's beta, but it really messes up the page. It works like translation worked in Chrome 8 years ago. This is quite important for me as I live somewhere where I just about scrape by with the local language. Honestly, any important governmental stuff I need a browser for, like taxes, is still done in Chrome. h265 on Firefox on Linux simply won't work without some hackity-hacks, which are in repos, but my employer doesn't allow us to install these on our company laptops (nor VLC).
I use Vivaldi with the tracker blocking and ads on abusive sites blocking, settings enabled, together with a third-party adblocker. On the rare occasions a site doesn't work properly I use, in order of priority, Opera, Firefox and Edge, with Edge used very rarely. I also use Vivaldi's email client.
Been using Opera for years, but I'm slowly moving back to Firefox - laptop and spare rig already. Main pc and phone soon. It was the horrific memory leaks that drove me away but I believe that's no longer an issue.
I used Firefox about 20 years ago in my teenage years, then moved onto Chrome at some point in the last 10-15 years. I have recently moved back to Firefox because I found Chrome more and more of a resource hog, plus I wanted to somewhat disentangle myself from the Google Overlords. I now run it with ublock origin and Bitwarden for password management.
I cut my teeth on Netscape, then moved to Firefox when Netscape went away (fun fact: you can still download a modern Netscape! It's Chromium in a wig!). Spent a bit of time with Chrome when I first got an Android phone, then went back to Firefox. I still use Firefox 'cos it's... like, the only cross-platform browser that can load modern pages and isn't Chromium. Seriously. Edge? Opera? Vivaldi (which is by the old Opera team)? Brave <spit>? They're all Chromium. I don't like giving Google that much control over the web - and it's already shown how it plans to use that control, in changing the add-on rules specifically to break things like uBlock Origin. (No, uBlock Origin Lite isn't a replacement.) But... by the Emperor, Mozilla makes it hard to stick with Firefox. It's currently helmed by a bunch of AI maximalists who are insistent on on putting AI everywhere. The latest anti-feature: a sidebar that lets you chat with a bunch of third-party LLMs from the like of Anthropic and OpenAI. Yeah, from the browser that promised it was pro-privacy and pro-open-web. Developed by a commercial subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation that literally just laid off its entire open web advocacy team. This: The reason it's hot garbage is 'cos it's an LLM. But a small one. (Yeah, a small large language model. Come at me, pedants). Runs on-device. That's also why it can't beat hosted services like Google Translate (which is what Chrome uses). And, yes, like any LLM, it will occasionally just... hallucinate. Just what you want from a translation engine. But... I still use Firefox, 'cos it's either that or Google with your choice of oni mask on. Though there are glimmers of hope on the horizon: the Servo project (which was a Mozilla thing, until Mozilla got bored) is still ongoing though miles away from usable. There's Ladybird, similarly, but the guy behind it is a douchenozzle so sod that. Oh, and there's Gemini, of course, though that's a hope for a different web rather than just a different browser. But if, like me, you miss the simpler days of Netscape... SeaMonkey. A glimpse into an alternate universe where Firefox didn't throw out the entire Netscape codebase but just kept updating it instead.
It was internal politics at Mozilla and/or in the open source project that caused me to dump Firefox as much as it was the product being not great.
I used IE until Firefox came along (0.86 I think it was), tabs were a game-changer, and used it up until Chrome came about. I was (and still am) deep in the Google ecosystem. My issue with it isn't even to do with how good it translates. Most of the time I can deduct what it's trying to say. My issue is with how it renders the translated page. It's like it re-renders the page, overwriting the original, then when you switch back it refreshes the page. This is a major annoyance when what I need it for mostly involves filling in forms.
Have I missed a memo? I don't see this feature. Similar Netscape to Firefox for me. Though Netscape was because my Dad showed it to me when I thought IE was the whole internet as a kid. Jump over to the fresh new Firefox made lots of sense and just kept using it. I worry about Mozilla's future, whether they can get the funding they need to survive. Now that Google are told to not pay third party for default search engine.
It's in the settings under "Customize your browsing." Doesn't seem to be enabled by default fortunately, but for how long... If Google really has to sell Chrome, I can see Google sneakily supporting Mozilla as a way to maintain influence.
'course, DOSBox-Staging has TCP/IP support these days... (Pictured just now, with a tweaked Lottes CRT shader enabled - hence the distortion.)
Firefox. For a number of reasons, but mostly this: Though I would add that the exception to this is Safari (as far as I'm aware anyway). But that's only relevant for macOS/iOS users. And also Firefox has one of my favourite plugins, which shows a neat little semaphore animation in the toolbar when a site uses the x-clacks-overhead header. It always makes me smile when I see it flashing away.
Hence why I specified "cross-platform." Safari's interesting 'cos it goes too far the other way: on iOS (at least until recently) you could install any browser you wanted... but they were all a skin on top of Safari. No other browser engines allowed.
Holy Z, I didn't know that was a thing! Something about Safari irritates me intensely, so I've had Firefox on my iPad for the last 4 years or so...
If you want a straightforward browser, with good privacy and security, DuckDuckGo works well on iPad. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now on my iPad.
Yup: you've been using a Firefox skin over Safari. Well, that's maybe a bit harsh: you've been using a special version of Firefox that uses Apple's WebKit engine, the same one as powers Safari. The ability for third-party browsers to use their own engines was only introduced in iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 18 in September this year - and only in the European Union. Everywhere else, the ban is still in effect. Same as above: DuckDuckGo Browser on iOS/iPadOS is a skin over WebKit. That doesn't mean it's not better than Safari, in the same way that you could argue Vivaldi is better (or more feature-packed, at least) than Chrome/Chromium - but it's not a true third-party browser in the same way as, say, Firefox on Android. As of late last month, the Competition and Markets Authority was looking into it.
