It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 2053 points –
androidpolice.com

• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla's focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google's ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.

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That's really strange, I haven't encountered either of those problems. The latter you can blame your distro for. If Firefox was bundled with all of the codecs it would be really big for no reason, and it would be redundant on nearly every system.

Kinda agree, sure it is also a distro issue. Chromium-like browsers worked out of the box, though. In the end, the user should not really experience easy-to-fix problems like „I can‘t watch any Twitch streams“, and I‘m not really on a uncommon distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Edit: About the blocked ports, check the following variable in your about:config

network.security.ports.banned.override

This one needs to be set, if you would like to use ports, such as 8080.

Neither network.security.ports.banned nor network.security.ports.banned.override are defined by default in Firefox so I suspect the distro set them for you. Same for FTP. And I've never had any issues playing Twitch streams.

Generally curious how that would work. So how/why should a distro do that?

The port issue is a common one if you google it and I even had it in windows. The variable is empty because you set the exceptions there. No value = all ports are blocked.

I don't know why distro maintainers do what they do, but they can use policies or autoconfig to set non-standard default values. It's commonly used to set the distro homepage as the default page when you open Firefox but I guess some distros take that a bit further.

As you can see from some of the other replies many of us don't have those config options by default, and according to the Mozilla Knowledge Base these options are not set by default in Firefox: "This preference does not exist by default."

I don't know why distro maintainers do what they do, but they can use policies or autoconfig to set non-standard default values. It's commonly used to set the distro homepage as the default page when you open Firefox but I guess some distros take that a bit further.

As you can see from some of the other replies many of us don't have those config options by default, and according to the Mozilla Knowledge Base these options are not set by default in Firefox: "This preference does not exist by default."