Can someone remind me why we stopped using Firefox a while back? There was some piece of news that broke everyone's trust, but I can't remember what Mozilla did. Was it a change in their user agreement?

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[–] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I never fully did, but I did end up using Chromium more than I wanted to:

  1. Some poorly written sites refuse to work with FF. My water company, for example. They eventually fixed it after I complained multiple times. Now they display a warning that it's "Optimized for Chrome" but no longer flat out prevent FF from logging in (you know, to pay bills and such).
  2. FF Desktop still doesn't support PWAs, and their recent update says they're working on it, but they're half-assing it (installed web apps will still have the menu bars, address, bar etc). I self-host a lot of web applications and want them to appear like native apps. Hence, Chromium.
  3. There was some recent ToS / Privacy Policy change, and everyone was knee-jerking "time to abandon Firefox" as if there's anywhere better to go. (This is probably what you're thinking of)
  4. A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster. That's been a while, and I think when FF's "Quantum" update (or whatever it was called) came out in like 2016 or 2017, it put it back on par.
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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster

    Performance was huge.

    I was willing to put up with a little jank from my browser because I wanted a diverse browser ecosystem, but Chrome felt much, much now performant. After I switched to Chrome, browsing felt noticably better.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    A good while back, Chrome was superior. Faster yes, but also more polished and intuitive as browsers go.

    Also, Google was "Do no Evil", and Firefox was good, but not great.

    Today, Firefox is still good, and Google is evil.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Times definitely have changed.

    Also, Google was "Do no Evil"

    At the time Google seemed awesome. Gmail was a game changer - a usable webapp that was better than maybe clients.

    Firefox was good, but not great.

    Firefox was the best of a bad bunch. It was so easy for devs to move to Chrome because the experience on every other browser was bad.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    #2 for me. The PWAs for Firefox extension broke one too many times so I gave up.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    Good news - Firefox is actively developing built-in PWA functionality right now. There's a discussion thread I'll link you to when I find it.

    EDIT - here you go, this also has links to further discussions: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561

    There's already a VERY early version in FF Nightly, but tbh it doesn't yet really do anything you'd expect of a PWA.

    Info on that: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-create-the-best-support-for-web-apps-on-the/m-p/60561#U60561

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