How much does it really matter to use firefox?
How much does it really matter to use firefox?
I donate to the Mozilla foundation, and I love Firefox a ton. But I can't seem to like the UI by installing a theme, and when I change it to look better the browser slows to a crawl. Does it really matter all that much if I use Chromium?
P.S. To the people from my last post regarding something similar, Firefox was too slow, I'm sorry, but I use Vivaldi instead of Brave because Brendon Eich can suck my dick.
tl;dr: A notable marketshare of multiple browser components and browsers must exist in order to properly ensure/maintain truly open web standards.
It is important that Firefox and its components like Gecko and Spidermonkey to exist as well as maintain a notable marketshare. Likewise, it is important for WebKit and its components to exist and maintain a notable marketshare. The same is true for any other browser/rendering/JavaScript engines.
While it is great that we have so many non-Google Chrome alternatives like Chromium, Edge, Vivaldi, etc., they all use the same or very similar engines. This means that they all display and interact with websites nearly identically.
When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way. If the Chrome/Chromium based browsers reaches a nearly unanimous browser marketshare, then Google can either ignore any/all open web standards, force their will in deciding/implementing new open web standards, or even become the defacto open web standard.
When any one entity has that much control over the open web standards, then the web standards are no longer truly "open" and in this case becomes "Google's web standards". In some (or maybe even many) cases, this may be fine. However, we saw with Internet Explorer in the past this is not something that the market should allow. We are seeing evidence that we shouldn't allow Google to have this much influence with things like the adoption of JPEG XL or implementation of FLoC.
With three or more browser engines, rendering engines, and browsers with notable marketshares, web developers are forced to develop in adherence to the accepted open web standards. With enough marketshare spread across those engines/browsers, the various engines/browsers are incentivized to maintain compatibility with open web standards. As long as the open web standards are designed and maintained without overt influence by a single or few entities and the open standards are actively used, then the best interest of the collective of all internet users is best served.
Otherwise, the best interest of a few entities (in this case Google) is best served.
Yep, good explanation; but to add to this...
The important factor here as far as what an individual uses is the tracked metrics. When a browser looks at a website, it identifies itself and its engine. Therefore actually using an engine other than Chromium is important because it goes into use stats across all websites the individual visits.
And like with all collective endeavors, while an individual contribution is insignificant, the whole is made up of those individual contributions. It also only takes a few percentage points of users for a business to in theory want to avoid excluding those users and thus keep them developing for multiple browsers.
Or to recap from history, Internet Explorer has no incentive to follow web standards and web design was a stagnant table-based layout until Netscape shows up. Wouldn't have complete separation of text and style the way we do today if css never took off.
When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way.
There's no reason they can't decide not to behave that way.
Ff is faster for me
You don't even make sense. Themes slowing down the browser, what?? That doesn't happen.
Hmmm. Hard to get over that dislike of an interface. I have found one plugin killed Firefox performance for me but I'm generally happy with the layout so haven't messed with it.
On how important it is: I used Chromium for a while but went back to Firefox because I read someone somewhere say "If you don't use Firefox, there eventually wont be a Firefox to use" and that was enough for me to switch back.
If you're donating to Mozilla though, I guess they're more than happy with that even if you're not using the product.
That's the same reason I don't complain about having to pay taxes for schools, even if I don't have a child in school right now.
Use what you like and don’t give a fuck about strangers on the internet deem the holy grail of browsers.
You should, however, give a fuck about the implications of using said browsers, which "strangers on the internet" make you aware of, for good reason.
Nobody is just being bullied into choosing a specific browser. People are passionate about this because what browsers people use shapes the web and how we all use it. And since so many services aren't even available outside the web, that can have a huge impact on our collective lives as a whole.
The average person won’t give a fuck about the implications of using said browsers, which “strangers on the internet” make them aware of.
I never implied that people were being bullied into using a specific browser, just that people shouldn’t give a fuck if they post a picture of their desktop and someone bitches about them using Chrome and starts circlejerking Firefox/Brave/[Insert Browser Here].
Same energy as "I'm not interested in politics".
Then don't complain when Google forces their view of internet on everyone else.
It matters as much as you want it to.
Use what you prefer, except brave, they can go fuck themselves.
Firefox works great for me, but I have OP hardware.
I prefer Brave
I prefer supporting browser alternatives as opposed to supporting Google's monopoly of web browsing
Google provides the majority of mozilla's funding
Well, if that extends beyond paying to be the default search engine, I'd be happy to take a look at a source if you have one. Changing search engines is also only a matter of a few clicks.
Classic...ask for more info and they disappear
Remove all your plug-ins and run it standalone. Firefox doesn't drag ass.
Well, if Firefox does become unusable for you, then I don't think you would be at fault for switching to a Chromium-based browser, like Vivaldi. Usability is an important aspect to consider.
Have you considered using a Firefox fork, like LibreWolf?
Out of interest what part of the UI don't you like? You can drag and drop pretty much any button and component where ever you want and you can use the Firefox colours website to apply any colour scheme you want. This is all core browser features so no performance affects.
What is it that a theme is then adding?
Not OP, but I also prefer Vivaldi over Firefox. My reason may not be the same as OP's, but for the sake of discussion, here it is. I simply can't stand having tabs on top of my screen, and I'll go to great lengths to have them on the bottom. On my private computer, I used to use Firefox with Tab Mix Plus, until Mozilla killed support for such extensions. I later managed to get the tabs to the bottom via custom CSS for Firefox, but every few releases the CSS stopped working and had to be recreated from scratch. So, I switched to Vivaldi. On my work PC, where only Edge and Chrome are allowed, my workaround is to work in separate windows instead of tabs, but that tends to get a little messy.
Whatever you've done to UI must be some atrocity as I do not experience issues with FF. You've never specified which FF extension you've used that had slowed down your browser.
Chrome (and by extension) Chromium and all derivative browsers are Google's lever to truly control and shape internet to their liking. Multiple people said it already.
Personally I find Chromium UI very cumbersome and dislike it a lot. Which is to say we all have our own preferences for UI.
In your case you'd have to weigh your repulsion with available performant FF UIs vs future of internet and choose which decision can you really live with.
using firefox on Linux with i5 6th gen, ddr3 32gb.
have over 100 tabs. most are suspended. cannot say it is slow.
edit: running with NVMe
I use a laptop with about 6GB of ram :/
Browser ram usage will just about always max out the available ram. It's by design. It's keeping open as much as it can for a faster user experience. As you run other programs, the browser should be giving up ram (blanking more tabs) to give it to the programs demanding it.
FF runs fine on my 4gb netbook and 2gb raspi, I think you might have other bottlenecks on your system that are causing your issues
Firefox runs better than chrome browser in my very old laptop with 3GB RAM. In fact this was the reason I used only Firefox on my old laptop.
FF is totally broken for me when I try to use anything Google or Cloudflare related for some reason. With cloudflare, I'm in a human verification loop and with Google I get the message "This browser or app may not be secure", in a regular window or private window. This is Ubuntu 22.04. Works fine in chrome. Only browser plug-in I use is KeePassXC, and disabling it doesn't resolve the issue. Disabling pfblocker-ng at my router also did not solve the issue.
Anecdotal, and I am a Windows idiot, but I've never had a problem like this with Firefox in my life. People always talk about how slow it is and how half the internet doesn't work on it but I've personally never had a single problem. It's just worked perfectly out of the box since the very beginning.
Makes me wonder what the difference is.
Have you tried creating a new, clean profile? You can do so with
about:profiles.I'll give that a shot when I get home.
This fixed the issue. Thanks for the suggestion!
Weird, they all work fine for me. Some cookies thing?
Private browser, wiped local data. I have no idea what the problem is.
Firefox is faster than Chrome for me. Theme isn't an issue for me, but the thing that took me a long time to get where I like it, is getting rid of all the buttons and UI elements and plugin icons that I didn't want to see all the time to get things streamlined down to where I like them. It did take me a couple months to get everything how I like it, but now when I use chrome, it seems clunky.
Trying to switch tools takes a while to get right and to re-learn. There are some things I don't like about Firefox still, but more I don't like about Chrome.
as much as I like firefox, it runs like crap on Android. Performance is just not quite there (yet)
Use Firefox daily at work on three different smartphones over the years and never had any performance issues. In fact, it was usually much faster.
Can't say I know what's going on.
What are you running into? Performance for me is more or less the same between both. I'm on a Pixel 4a but also running pihole and ublock so maybe that speeds things.
While it is important in a sense what you use, you and I are such a miniscule inconsequential part of the equation that it won't matter what you actually end up using
Use what you like instead and dont worry too much about what these hokier than thou doichenozzles wanna force you into usinfg
I use Firefox because Chrome screws up my task bar icons too often. I have to use a PWA extension for Firefox to get that functionality, but once set up it just works.