I've been removing Google services from my life bit by bit over the past year, and I have to say it is crazy how hard it actually is! They have inserted themselves into so many digital workflows, securing monopoly positions and preventing the rise of competitors and open ecosystems. In many areas the only alternatives are other tech giants, or accepting feature downgrades and having to set things up manually.
I'm really glad that the browser is one area where the transition is actually very simple and straightforward!
What lessons have you learned so far? I've switched to FF and DDG with great results, but still use Gmail/android/photos.
I urge you to check out Kagi Browser[1]. I forgot how pain-free using a search engine could be. With Google, a relatively simple search had me typing:
sink tap gasket intitle:"replacement" OR intitle:"repair" filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc inurl:product OR inurl:details "made in" (site:.com OR site:.co.uk OR site:.de) -site:amazon.com -site:ebay.com
I am appreciative that I've gotten pretty good at finding obscure nuggets of info, and it makes Google Dork[2] searches even more fun, but when I simply need "where to by $x", Google shat out mindless SEO content.
I also highly recommend Fastmail[3] as an alternative email host. Far cheaper than Google Workspace for custom domains, and their masked email function is wonderful, even more so with 1Password[4].
Turning your back from the abusive Google can look intimidating to begin with, but it turns out it takes very little effort if you make a lil' plan of alternative services to use.
I saw this thread on mastodon the other day griping about Kagi not understanding how inherently political tech is which doesn't fill me with confidence in their ability to proceed ethically: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707573907442638
That's a darn shame, I just paid for a month of Kagi to try them out.
Saying "Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more." instead of answering the question is a way to dodge a question you don't want to answer. Super duper red flag. Unfortunate. I don't think I can even trust that their search results aren't biased.
What's your take on Kagi joining partnership with brave?
The biggest thing is probably that you'll have to pay for things if you want something that's ethical and preserves your privacy, either a paid service or some initial investment into self-hosting (what I did). It's 100% worth it imo though, being mostly free from big tech feels really nice!
More specifically, I can highly recommend getting a Synology NAS and your own domain name. They have great replacements for many Google apps, and you can also try out open source alternatives with Docker.
I'm barely feeding my family and paying bills at this point. Paying for privacy, email or storage isn't an option. I guess I need to up my hobby IT game.
Yeah, I'll never use Chrome again. Google has always been shady, but this latest round of anti-features is unbelievable. I'm shocked there's been no anti-trust suits related to what they're doing with Chrome. Firefox is just a better browser with way more security options and extension support. That alone is enough for me to stick with it.
Switched to it recently, have been absolutely loving it!
No regrets!
I tried and just not having grouped tabs is so painful. That and being embedded in Google's federated system makes it hard to get out. Any advice on how to make the switch in the least painful way?
See if there is a plug in for grouped tab.
While you're not wrong, I was hoping for some recommendations as I've not found any plugins that make grouped tabs easy to use.
Try using Sidebery, you can have panels, groups, containers, and snapshots in vertical tab tree style.
I've also recently started using this extension, and it's incredible by comparison. Despite the name being "Simple", it feels way more advanced than Chrome's half-hearted attempt at tab groups.
This is the same issue I have. It's too different and clunky to me and every time I try it I have to switch back.
I still have Chromium (on Debian) running solely for the Google stuff I still use. Trying to get away from that as well but it'll take some time. Be patient with yourself.
I have to restart it once or twice each day as it refuses to play videos or audio after a while. I know it's not a settings or add-on issue, and I searched everywhere for an explanation. It fucking sucks. I'm this close to going back to Chrome.
If you're the only one who has that issue, or it's very uncommon, then it's more likely a software or hardware configuration issue or some corruption on your systems part.
Just saying this, when I used to run windows, weird bugs like that as a cue to do a complete reinstall of windows. Usually would fix every problem I'd been having with every app to date.
Even now deleting everything associated to Firefox and reinstalling the app would probably fix it. The other thing to do is to keep an eye on the behaviour of your browser after installing extensions. Sometimes extensions themselves can cause weird problems.
There are a couple tiny issues I have with it that drive me nuts (namely: 1 how they implement the CSS blur filter sucks and 2 the fact that they haven't implemented page transitions even though I think it was their idea to start with (?))
But other than those things, I certainly don't feel like I'm missing anything by ditching Google.
I keep it all in Forums where nobody would think to look.
Chrome: First-party spyware.
If Firefox goes away, I'll use Epiphany or Konquerer before I subject myself to anything that makes me view ads.
FF has way too much groundwork laid and way too much mindshare currently (especially given the rust language and all..) If, for some reason, thousands of devs just gave up on mozilla, more would continue the path and fork it most likely.
Mozilla is the result of people giving up on Netscape. It will live!
It's the result of Netscape losing to anti-trust behaviour by Microsoft and open sourcing their code as a final parting gift.
Netscape was struck down Firefox rose.
And that's surely why it was originally called Phoenix!
I hope that's true, because I'm hearing rumblings that Mozilla is moving away from it as their core project.
I've used Firefox for years. It's always been the underdog imo.
If it ever becomes the top dog, I'll switch! To the next privacy underdog. More competition is good.
FF has always been security conscious and was actually the big dog until around 2007 or so when they had to do a full rebuild of their code and this made it so that a lot of peoples' favorite plugins stopped working until they were updated. This coincided with when Chrome started to become bigger and people switched. Now people are switching back. I use a combination of FF and Opera GX.
IIRC they switched to webextensions in Firefox 57 in 2017. Even before that it was never the browser with the biggest market share, and Chrome had already got a huge market share in 2017.
I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my default browser since 2003. Never understood the appeal of Chrome.
Even before that it was never the browser with the biggest market share
Between 2005 and 2007 it sort of felt like that for me. All kinds of computer-illiterate people were switching to Firefox.
I actually remember when Chrome first became a thing, I tried it then, used for some time as something cool, and then got back to Opera.
FF was definitely the top dawg through the last half of the aughts.
People got frustrated with the constant updates. Chrome had a lot of hype and for a while was the slick new browser. It didn't take long for it to get just as slow as FF used to be, but now more enterprise web-apps will cripple compatibility on non-chromium browsers so it doesn't matter how good FF gets.
I was one of the users who left because TabMixPlus stopped working. Never worked again, so I'm with Vivaldi. I know; it's built on Chromium, but being able to have my tabs on the bottom of the window is worth it for me.
I've read so many bs paid-off articles recently how chrome is so much better than firefox, or firefox has nothing left to give to its users
I agree it's BS, but how do you know they're "paid off"? What's an example of one that was "paid off"?
Made the switch to Firefox last year. Love, love, love the freshness and versatility of the browser! Also add-ons for mobile!!!!
Chrome is the new reddit
So nothing will change 😅
Lots of people can't just straight up ditch it. I have had multiple websites just don't work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put. For me I just go into a Windows sandbox, but there's people who are not that tech savvy and it's often forced on them. Also iirc most schools have chrome books they let students use. So it's basically forced onto people.
Do you have any examples? I have used Firefox for years and never experienced this, nor heard of anyone I know who uses Firefox experiencing this.
Not the commenter, but...
I play tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder 2e for those care) online with some friends, and we use a website which hosts the program (forge-vtt.com).
For the life of me, I cannot get it to behave on Firefox. Maps will be pitch black while on Chrome they render perfectly. I've tried every permutation of browser setting and extension toggling I can think of to no avail.
Tried switching off hardware acceleration?
Yup, that was the common suggestion I was finding, but no luck with it on or off.
I've hit the odd site where a menu doesn't work the way it should, the payment form doesn't work, overall form validation is wonky, or the captcha doesn't work. I attribute most of these to slight nuances in javascript between browsers.
I'm a (old, grey) dev, and I've had to shame colleagues into testing in mobile browsers other than Chrome and Safari.
I love iOS, but I gotta bring up that other browsers on iOS are all Safari with a skin.
Trying to get my account back for my PS5 forced me to use edge for it to work at all
And then to use edge on my wife's PC because something I have installed REALLY pisses Sony off
Oftentimes, when I use Firefox (Main browser on my phone) things just don't render/show up. One thing I noticed was when I input my area code to find a package distribution center, and it straight up didn't show. Iirc it relied on Google maps for showing these places.
It worked in Chrome. Not pointing any fingers, it's just odd, is what I'm saying.
I use Firefox except for one thing: web serial. Chrome is the only browser that supports it. Luckily you only need it the when setting up an ESP32 for the first time and can do updates wirelessly.
If a website or app doesn't test in Firefox, I avoid it. That's something I run into like once a year, and I just use edge once if I need to, and avoid that website or app in the future. It's not hard to support Firefox, it's just a shitty ass business decision not to
Use a Chromium fork instead if you're having so much trouble. Thorium is a decent alternative.
Well of course. Now all your traffic goes through proxies to Google's servers for analytics.
100℅ data harvesting.
Genius move by Google. Even calls it a security/privacy measure!
They will succeed too. Most of the human race are Neanderthals anyway. Couldn't care less.
Please don't with this tech elitest stuff. Yeah, most people will continue to use chrome because they don't really understand the gravity of what it means for their privacy, doesn't mean we can't do our best to help them out.
It's like oil dependency, we could blame the individual but that really doesn't help the situation. Unless of course we're talking about individual executives, those bastards are totally culpable.
Well said. Contempt for the average user makes it easy to forget one's humanity.
You did so well until the last few sentences. Casually throwing everyone under the bus as idiots isn't a great move.
To be blunt, there's a lot of tech noobs out there that have always been, and will always be, fairly bad with technology. There's an even larger number that can't be bothered to pay attention or care about it. And finally, there's the enthusiasts and the tech savvy, most of whom are working in a tech related field (or want to). Special shout out to the enthusiasts who don't work in a tech field who are still quite savvy. But let's face it, the enthusiasts and the tech savvy are a minority. We are not their targets. Fact is, even if you're using Google's various services or Chrome or whatever, the tech literate are at least aware of what's happening, and a nontrivial number of them are here. Including you and I.
It then becomes our job to save others from themselves and get them away from the products looking to harm them. Throwing in the towel and calling everyone neaderthals isn't the way to accomplish this. If we all do our part, we can save those we care about from becoming yet another battery in the machine, with all their data flowing through one company. It's our duty.
For those that REALLY want to help, get involved in local politics and be the change. Help push regulation on the corporate shills that want it all. Whether that's running for office, or contacting your local representative or whatever, it's something that should be done. They shouldn't be allowed to just implement, what is essentially mass surveillance on the world without someone doing something about it. That's what the government is supposed to be there to do. I'll reserve my comments about how effective they've been in the past or how corrupt the whole system is, because that will vary from country to country. But bluntly, you can be that change by getting involved.
As to the comments about the general idiocy of the population of earth, I say this: do you know it all? Well, neither do they. Nobody does. Can you fix your car and then turn around and frame a shed from scratch? Me neither. Can you perform experiments to discover new and exciting things in quantum physics, then build a toaster from raw materials? Me neither. Can you fix your plumbing, then create a program in Pascal that does your taxes for you? Me neither. Everyone has their skills, talents and expertise. Simply because there is a large percentage of people whose expertise is not tech, doesn't, and shouldn't, invalidate their intelligence as an individual.
Check yourself, or the next time you have a problem you don't know how to fix, people might just throw in the towel on helping you.
We really need more browser engines floating around.
As of now we really only have 3, Webkit, Firefox Gecko, and Chromium Blink.
Everything is based on these 3. And I know, technically chromium and firefox are both based on webkit, but they're so far gone from webkit they function as their own engines.
Firefox isn't based on WebKit. Maybe you're thinking Safari.
Ultimately you really only have KHTML (what Webkit was forked from), Gecko, Triton (IE classic), and I can't recall what the new (now dead) engine in IE11 was called. The rest are forks, mostly of Webkit/KHTML.
I guess there's Ladybird and Servo too, but they are a way still from being used as a daily driver.
I doubt that's what they meant since Safari currently uses WebKit. But yeah, maybe they meant how WebKit is a fork of KHTML and Chrome is a fork of WebKit.
As of now we really only have 3, Webkit, Firefox, and Chromium.
Webkit is the only browser engine in that list; the other 2 are browsers, not engines. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. Chrome/chromium use Blink engine.
Google recently revised that motto, it now has a comma after the first word.
Ironically, in the past year, one of my employers specifically disallowed Firefox due to a CVE, saying that we were to use Chrome. A Cybersecurity professional once told me that Firefox is frowned upon because of CVEs.
A Cybersecurity professional once told me that Firefox is frowned upon
This has been rampant for years now.
There was a massive movement years ago to get every user on Chrome.
Even going so far as to replace all appearances of IE with Chrome, then change the Chrome desktop icon to the IE icon, then tell the users it’s a new better version of IE.
Are you alluding to Edge becoming a chromium fork? Or did some orgs really do this weird icon trickery?
Not orgs,..exactly.
There was a huge push by a lot of IT and tech based people to get behind and push promotion of Chrome over Firefox and IE. FF had its issues at the time and seemingly everyone trusted Google to no end (ashamedly myself included).
I’m gonna say this really started to happen ~2010 or so.
I wish I could find some of the old Reddit threads and memeing that happened surrounding it all.
Way ahead of you. Been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix.
If I'm forced to use a Chrome browser, I use a deGoogled version of chromium. I can't think of the last time I've had to use it though. Firefox support is a priority for my company's IT dept.
since netscape navigator here. even used netscape during the dark ages (when aol controlled it).
I was so happy when Netscape 4.0 released for OS/2.
My main problem is that I prefer other frontends to Firefox. I mostly use Vivaldi and think it's great, but of course it's Chromium based. I read somewhere that it's just way easier to base a browser on Chrome than it is to base one on Firefox. It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That's not how it (currently) works though.
There are Firefox forks, but they're just that: forks with slight modifications. Vivaldi and Arc are basically completely different browsers. Even Orion isn't based on Gecko, it's based on WebKit.
Add to that small compatibility issues with certain websites/web apps that aren't Firefox' fault, but rather developers targeting Chrome instead of "100 % web standards". Still, as a user you'll likely into (small) issues from time to time.
People saying "just use Firefox" have a very narrow view on how any of this works and I sometimes feel like it's some form of elitism where the cool kids use Firefox and everybody using anything else are "lesser people". In reality, people have different requirements and priorities. It's similar to people posting "just use Linux" under every article talking about problems with Windows.
Yes, Chrome and Google sucks, I agree, but there isn't a single universal solution to this problem.
People saying "just use Firefox" have a very narrow view on how any of this works
No, not at all. I understand perfectly. Your concerns are valid.
Our point is not supporting Chrome is more important in the long run.
There is no front end in the world that will make up for the loss of true ad blocking and everything else Google pushes down the line.
Let's be clear about this:
I don't want to tell you to use Firefox. I want to tell you to use whatever you like. I wish we lived in a world where the choice didn't matter.
But we don't
When I'm telling people to use firefox, I'm telling them if you have a problem with the direction the internet is going in, you actually have to do something about it beyond just complaining. Support the competition, the only non-profit in the space, and the only true alternative browser left. Because everything is going to get exponentially worse without competition, and we really really need to preserve the one remaining safe refuge.
What features does Vivaldi have that don't exist in a FF extension?
And using a WebKit based browser is still better than using a chromium fork.
I don't know. I still prefer having vertical tabs, tab grouping, workspaces, web panels, proper loading information, full page screenshots and way more integrated in my browser instead of having to rely on possibly dozens of different extensions that in my testing never provided nearly as good of an experience.
Implementation details matter.
Also mouse gestures and tab tiling. Vivaldi has so many useful features baked in that I don't want to give up.
Vertical tabs: Sidebery. It might actually be better than the Vivaldi native. I havent used vivaldi with vertical tabs that much, its just a work/secondary browser for me.
Gestures: Gesturify. This is just better than the vivaldi native one.
Tab tiling: well you got me on this one. This is actually pretty neat.
To be clear, I like vivaldi as well, it is my chromium of choice but with the above two extensions firefox is chefs kiss.
I'll take a look, thanks. I'm not thrilled with the idea of using a dozen extensions that could break or become incompatible, but I would prefer to get off of chrome!
For me it is only 5 extensions really which are essential. uBlock Origin, Dark reader, Sidebery & Gesturify & User agent switcher (it can come in handy every once in a while).
P.S. There is a little caveat to vertical tabs which i forgot. You have to follow an easy 5 step guide on how to hide horizontal tabs when sidebery is active.
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Im sorry, but dont know what you are refering to. Could you elaborate?
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You can get vertical tabs on firefox with custom userChrome.css but it is a nightmare to setup and mozilla is only interested on breaking userChrome with every update lol.
tell me about it! literally the ONE thing keeping me from FF at the moment. vertical tabs are too vital to my workflow at this point to sacrifice.
tell me about it! literally the ONE thing keeping me from FF at the moment. vertical tabs are too vital to my workflow at this point to sacrifice.
I don't know exactly how to do it, I know you can because when I was in the firefoxcss subreddit there were many posts on how people came up with their own solutions for vertical tabs.
I wanted vertical tabs to save on screenspace, for some reason the default firefox has the biggest top bar of all browsers and it is horrible, this is the userChrome.css that I use, it does what I wanted but it is not vertical tabs:
It is also keyboard centric, I also had to install an extension because firefox (and this only happens on linux) uses alt+number to switch between tabs instead of control+number.
I could never get hardware accelerated video working with Firefox on my Linux laptop, and Google Meet (used for work) doesn't work well ( but I guess I blame Google for that).
Google meet sucks hard on every browser and piece of hardware I've thrown at it.
Why is using WebKit-based browser “better” than Chromium-based one? Neither supports Google’s monopoly. Vivaldi is not just a skin for Google Chrome, it continues to support manifest v2 extensions and proper adblockers. And the company is owned by the workers, which is super cool
I tried really hard to use Floorp which fixes most of my problems with stock Firefox but even that just showed me how excellent Vivaldi is compared to other browsers.
It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That’s not how it (currently) works though.
Arc has floated this idea. Currently Arc is Chromium-based, but they say they've designed it to allow for swapping engines in the future.
IIRC, Edge had a similar feature for a while, allowing you to run legacy Internet Explorer tabs if a site required it. Not sure if that still exists.
Let me add that support for passkeys is becoming more and more important and Firefox doesn't support passkeys. Yes, it supports forms of WebAuthn (YubiKey and the likes), but not "scan this QR code with your smartphone and use biometric authentication to sign in".
I’m glad I’m in a position to basically never have to touch a chrome or chrome derivative for my work. It was a necessary evil to finally kill internet explorer, but these days it’s just hostile to its users.
I've been using Firefox since somewhere around 2008, it's been a dream the whole time.
Highly recommended
Tiny devils advocate, IF we can make it so ONLY Google can spy on us and malware adware can NOT spy on us would be an “improvement”. Google is a lot easier to target with regulation and stuff.
That said, I wouldn’t touch Google with a 10 foot pole.
You're not wrong. One spy is better than 1+x spies, especially if that one spy is well controlled with regulation. Better than bad is still not necessarily good.
It's a false dichotomy. We can't make it so only Google can spy on us, and conceding to Google has no impact on other malware. Besides, it's the largest advertising company in the world by a large margin, with a near monopoly on online advertising. It probably wouldn't even make a difference.
Oh, no, no, no, it can look like a good thing, but it's terrible. If google gets the "spying monopoly", they will have such power in their hands that they will be able to, alone, to things like manipulate your habits and routine, decide when you should replace your electronics, manipulate elections, markets, and so much more. It can seem, at first, that it would be easier to "just block google and that's it" or "just let the governments regulate them", but in reality, they would create a scenario where you couldn't even browse the web or use simple tech devices without being logged in in a "safety-something compatible device", while lobbying heavily to do so.
They're already trying to go that way. With a monopoly, they would simply have no resistance at all.
Thanks for the reminder. I've switched to Firefox on my mac and iphone for personal use. I just need to move some web development stuff around so I can switch to Firefox on that too. I may even uninstall google chrome, but for now I've just taken it off the task bar.
Correct me if I am wrong but arent Apple based browsers all modifications of WebKit/Safari?
Or is it a iOS/iPad OS specific thing and MacOS is actually free from those restrictions by being able to sideload.
That's exclusive to iOS/iPad OS. There aren't any such restrictions on macOS.
Neat to know. Thank you :)
MacOS is actually much more open than most people think. There’s a lot of protections for the average user but if you know what you’re doing it can all be bypassed.
I came back to firefox after vivaldi and edge when google announced manifestv3, decided to do it already since they would at best delay it instead of canceling it, and that's exactly what they did.
Yeah yeah, Mozilla pays its clueless CEO and other execs way too much, mismanages its finances in general, fired the wrong people, fell for the hype about AI, has a board full of former Facebook and Twitter execs, relies excessively on telemetry to justify their worst UI design decisions, and occasionally has delusions about someday becoming an ad platform.
If it weren't for all that we'd all be better off. But sometimes you gotta vote for the lesser evil, and at least they don't do all this shit.
The one feature that I really liked that's still in chromium other than Google cast is still Web Apps.
I like to be able to make a desktop application out of a web page. Firefox has this feature with PRISM a while back. Did it ever come back?
While I agree on this, I think Ungoogled Chromium could be a soft way to degoogle yourself while maybe looking for complete replacements. It took me almost 2 weeks to degoogle me almost totally, at the beginning having a minimum of compatibility is nice
The only Google thing holding me back from full degoogling is YouTube, but with how garbage the platform is becoming, especially with the algorithm just going berserk and it probably not being long until I start being affected by the adblock-block, I think moving away from it is only going to be easier than ever before.
serious question: what do for email if you've been a gmail user for .... (checks notes) ... almost 20 years? self hosted?
honest question. I'm interested, but really have no idea what my options are when I've had the same email address for half my life / all of my adult life.
Proton Mail as others have suggested is the easy and privacy friendly solution, and probably set an auto forwarding rule from your gmail account to your new Proton Mail.
Otherwise I haven't self hosted my own email but from my previous attempts it seemed like it's quite involved
Protonmail does have a problem with often being classified as a temporary email provider. Some websites refuse to allow registrations using protonmail emails. Solution is to not use those websites.
I'm yet to run into that myself (2+ year user of it) but I would believe that
Fastmail with a custom domain. It’s great, and has a nice migration tool for moving everything over from Gmail. Also integrates nicely with 1Password for personalized email addresses for each service I sign up for, which I can nuke as needed if needed.
awesome, thanks for that! I'll look into it.
I personally use mailbox.org for emails and anonaddy for aliases
Not married to my email and I bought my own domain.
The only hard part is switching all accounts to the new domain (and finding out that some IT/dev departments decided that changing emails doesnt happen at all).
I pay a company a bit too much money so I don't have to worry about self hosting.
Self hosting email is pretty much impossible nowadays. You have to use your hosting service servers at a minimum. But a dedicated email service will probably have better spam handling (although that's possibly not as bad as it once was).
I have switched to Firefox but I'm having a hard time. Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome and uses an insane amount of memory. And I really miss tab groups as Chrome had them. There are some add-ons for Firefox that try to imitate this feature but none of them has everything I want (e.g. the ability to collapse a group in the top tab bar). And most of them build on top of Firefox tab groups which come with an isolation feature I don't want (and haven't found a way to disable for tab groups).
I use Chrome on the rare occasion when I have no choice but to use FB. Always with VPN. Otherwise it's FF.
Why use Chrome for Facebook? The Facebook container sufficiently isolates it.
Good point, old habits from before the FB container existed.
The number of tab crashes in Firefox is way higher than it ever should be. I still use it but it's def not as stable as the chrome stuff.
What are you using that makes it crash, virtually never happens to me.
For me Firefox crashes all the time in normal use. I am talking minimum twice a day. It also has this weird problem where it will pin one thread to 100% and lock up the whole browser when downloading files. I also had to disable video hardware acceleration or else Twitch crashes every 5-10 minutes but luckily my CPU is so strong that it's not too big of a deal to do software decoding.
I still use it out of principle but it has been a way worse experience than Chromium ever was for me.
Yeah…I’m gonna say you have something that isn’t playing well with Firefox. Extensions, hardware….
I’ve been using Firefox for years now across multiple OS’s and hardware and I’ve never had anything like this happen to me
I have privacy badger, ublock, dark reader, tab session manager, bitwarden, and grease monkey(that is used to tweak hacker News).
I guess I could try to turn off ublock and privacy badger to see if that fixes anything, but the other extensions seem way less invasive and less likely to be the culprit.
hardly any issues here, either. and we abuse tf out of firefox.. 300+ tabs? stay open for days on end? multiple addons? on c2d-era desktops? no problem.
No idea. Nothing crazy. Twitch is one that's fairly regular but it happens seemingly randomly with normal browsing. It hasn't happened on mobile as far as I remember.
I send in each crash report so hopefully they'll be able to sort it out.
For me I had to disable video hardware acceleration (just video, not all acceleration) for Twitch to stop crashing all the time.
Ok so I really wanna switch, but I need to have multiple Gmail accounts active at the same time for work, as we have various logins tied to various profiles. From what I can tell Firefox doesn't yet support multiple profiles being active at the same time. Do I have any options here? I need to be able to access the support inbox and login to our platform, while simultaneously being logged in to my own email and my platform login. Chrome profiles makes this easy, annoyingly.
I post Contra Chrome every time Chrome and spyware are mentioned, but I'll post it here again.
I use Firefox at home and on my phone. I still use chrome at work because of habit and because that's what most users use. Some of the other guys use Firefox anyway. Its dev tools seem fine.
I've been removing Google services from my life bit by bit over the past year, and I have to say it is crazy how hard it actually is! They have inserted themselves into so many digital workflows, securing monopoly positions and preventing the rise of competitors and open ecosystems. In many areas the only alternatives are other tech giants, or accepting feature downgrades and having to set things up manually.
I'm really glad that the browser is one area where the transition is actually very simple and straightforward!
What lessons have you learned so far? I've switched to FF and DDG with great results, but still use Gmail/android/photos.
I urge you to check out Kagi Browser[1]. I forgot how pain-free using a search engine could be. With Google, a relatively simple search had me typing:
sink tap gasket intitle:"replacement" OR intitle:"repair" filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc inurl:product OR inurl:details "made in" (site:.com OR site:.co.uk OR site:.de) -site:amazon.com -site:ebay.comI am appreciative that I've gotten pretty good at finding obscure nuggets of info, and it makes Google Dork[2] searches even more fun, but when I simply need "where to by $x", Google shat out mindless SEO content.
I also highly recommend Fastmail[3] as an alternative email host. Far cheaper than Google Workspace for custom domains, and their masked email function is wonderful, even more so with 1Password[4].
Turning your back from the abusive Google can look intimidating to begin with, but it turns out it takes very little effort if you make a lil' plan of alternative services to use.
I saw this thread on mastodon the other day griping about Kagi not understanding how inherently political tech is which doesn't fill me with confidence in their ability to proceed ethically: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111707573907442638
That's a darn shame, I just paid for a month of Kagi to try them out.
Saying "Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more." instead of answering the question is a way to dodge a question you don't want to answer. Super duper red flag. Unfortunate. I don't think I can even trust that their search results aren't biased.
What's your take on Kagi joining partnership with brave?
The biggest thing is probably that you'll have to pay for things if you want something that's ethical and preserves your privacy, either a paid service or some initial investment into self-hosting (what I did). It's 100% worth it imo though, being mostly free from big tech feels really nice!
More specifically, I can highly recommend getting a Synology NAS and your own domain name. They have great replacements for many Google apps, and you can also try out open source alternatives with Docker.
I'm barely feeding my family and paying bills at this point. Paying for privacy, email or storage isn't an option. I guess I need to up my hobby IT game.
How many google services do you have? I just have one, and if I ever deleted it, all of the google apps I use would become worthless.
i switched to calyx os yesterday and i love it already!
Yeah, I'll never use Chrome again. Google has always been shady, but this latest round of anti-features is unbelievable. I'm shocked there's been no anti-trust suits related to what they're doing with Chrome. Firefox is just a better browser with way more security options and extension support. That alone is enough for me to stick with it.
Firefox has always been great to use for me.
Switched to it recently, have been absolutely loving it! No regrets!
I tried and just not having grouped tabs is so painful. That and being embedded in Google's federated system makes it hard to get out. Any advice on how to make the switch in the least painful way?
See if there is a plug in for grouped tab.
While you're not wrong, I was hoping for some recommendations as I've not found any plugins that make grouped tabs easy to use.
Try using Sidebery, you can have panels, groups, containers, and snapshots in vertical tab tree style.
I use Simple Tab Groups, it's great!
I've also recently started using this extension, and it's incredible by comparison. Despite the name being "Simple", it feels way more advanced than Chrome's half-hearted attempt at tab groups.
This is the same issue I have. It's too different and clunky to me and every time I try it I have to switch back.
I want out. What's the opinion on Chromium?
I still have Chromium (on Debian) running solely for the Google stuff I still use. Trying to get away from that as well but it'll take some time. Be patient with yourself.
I have to restart it once or twice each day as it refuses to play videos or audio after a while. I know it's not a settings or add-on issue, and I searched everywhere for an explanation. It fucking sucks. I'm this close to going back to Chrome.
If you're the only one who has that issue, or it's very uncommon, then it's more likely a software or hardware configuration issue or some corruption on your systems part.
Just saying this, when I used to run windows, weird bugs like that as a cue to do a complete reinstall of windows. Usually would fix every problem I'd been having with every app to date.
Even now deleting everything associated to Firefox and reinstalling the app would probably fix it. The other thing to do is to keep an eye on the behaviour of your browser after installing extensions. Sometimes extensions themselves can cause weird problems.
There are a couple tiny issues I have with it that drive me nuts (namely: 1 how they implement the CSS blur filter sucks and 2 the fact that they haven't implemented page transitions even though I think it was their idea to start with (?))
But other than those things, I certainly don't feel like I'm missing anything by ditching Google.
'Work' bookmarks
Sure buddy.
That's where you're wrong, buddy.
I keep it all in Forums where nobody would think to look.
Chrome: First-party spyware.
If Firefox goes away, I'll use Epiphany or Konquerer before I subject myself to anything that makes me view ads.
FF has way too much groundwork laid and way too much mindshare currently (especially given the rust language and all..) If, for some reason, thousands of devs just gave up on mozilla, more would continue the path and fork it most likely.
Mozilla is the result of people giving up on Netscape. It will live!
It's the result of Netscape losing to anti-trust behaviour by Microsoft and open sourcing their code as a final parting gift.
Netscape was struck down Firefox rose.
And that's surely why it was originally called Phoenix!
I hope that's true, because I'm hearing rumblings that Mozilla is moving away from it as their core project.
I've used Firefox for years. It's always been the underdog imo.
If it ever becomes the top dog, I'll switch! To the next privacy underdog. More competition is good.
FF has always been security conscious and was actually the big dog until around 2007 or so when they had to do a full rebuild of their code and this made it so that a lot of peoples' favorite plugins stopped working until they were updated. This coincided with when Chrome started to become bigger and people switched. Now people are switching back. I use a combination of FF and Opera GX.
IIRC they switched to webextensions in Firefox 57 in 2017. Even before that it was never the browser with the biggest market share, and Chrome had already got a huge market share in 2017.
I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my default browser since 2003. Never understood the appeal of Chrome.
Between 2005 and 2007 it sort of felt like that for me. All kinds of computer-illiterate people were switching to Firefox.
I actually remember when Chrome first became a thing, I tried it then, used for some time as something cool, and then got back to Opera.
So Firefox and Chromium.
I'll have to dump Opera at some point.
FF was definitely the top dawg through the last half of the aughts. People got frustrated with the constant updates. Chrome had a lot of hype and for a while was the slick new browser. It didn't take long for it to get just as slow as FF used to be, but now more enterprise web-apps will cripple compatibility on non-chromium browsers so it doesn't matter how good FF gets.
I was one of the users who left because TabMixPlus stopped working. Never worked again, so I'm with Vivaldi. I know; it's built on Chromium, but being able to have my tabs on the bottom of the window is worth it for me.
I use waterfox (firefox branch) and it has that as a default option https://imgur.com/oWzCeA7
I seriously miss tab mix plus.
I've read so many bs paid-off articles recently how chrome is so much better than firefox, or firefox has nothing left to give to its users
I agree it's BS, but how do you know they're "paid off"? What's an example of one that was "paid off"?
Made the switch to Firefox last year. Love, love, love the freshness and versatility of the browser! Also add-ons for mobile!!!!
Chrome is the new reddit
So nothing will change 😅
Lots of people can't just straight up ditch it. I have had multiple websites just don't work with Firefox regardless of whatever add-ons I put. For me I just go into a Windows sandbox, but there's people who are not that tech savvy and it's often forced on them. Also iirc most schools have chrome books they let students use. So it's basically forced onto people.
Do you have any examples? I have used Firefox for years and never experienced this, nor heard of anyone I know who uses Firefox experiencing this.
Not the commenter, but...
I play tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder 2e for those care) online with some friends, and we use a website which hosts the program (forge-vtt.com).
For the life of me, I cannot get it to behave on Firefox. Maps will be pitch black while on Chrome they render perfectly. I've tried every permutation of browser setting and extension toggling I can think of to no avail.
Tried switching off hardware acceleration?
Yup, that was the common suggestion I was finding, but no luck with it on or off.
I've hit the odd site where a menu doesn't work the way it should, the payment form doesn't work, overall form validation is wonky, or the captcha doesn't work. I attribute most of these to slight nuances in javascript between browsers.
I'm a (old, grey) dev, and I've had to shame colleagues into testing in mobile browsers other than Chrome and Safari.
I love iOS, but I gotta bring up that other browsers on iOS are all Safari with a skin.
Sonys website immediately comes to mind
Trying to get my account back for my PS5 forced me to use edge for it to work at all
And then to use edge on my wife's PC because something I have installed REALLY pisses Sony off
Oftentimes, when I use Firefox (Main browser on my phone) things just don't render/show up. One thing I noticed was when I input my area code to find a package distribution center, and it straight up didn't show. Iirc it relied on Google maps for showing these places.
It worked in Chrome. Not pointing any fingers, it's just odd, is what I'm saying.
I use Firefox except for one thing: web serial. Chrome is the only browser that supports it. Luckily you only need it the when setting up an ESP32 for the first time and can do updates wirelessly.
If a website or app doesn't test in Firefox, I avoid it. That's something I run into like once a year, and I just use edge once if I need to, and avoid that website or app in the future. It's not hard to support Firefox, it's just a shitty ass business decision not to
Use a Chromium fork instead if you're having so much trouble. Thorium is a decent alternative.
Well of course. Now all your traffic goes through proxies to Google's servers for analytics.
100℅ data harvesting.
Genius move by Google. Even calls it a security/privacy measure!
They will succeed too. Most of the human race are Neanderthals anyway. Couldn't care less.
Please don't with this tech elitest stuff. Yeah, most people will continue to use chrome because they don't really understand the gravity of what it means for their privacy, doesn't mean we can't do our best to help them out.
It's like oil dependency, we could blame the individual but that really doesn't help the situation. Unless of course we're talking about individual executives, those bastards are totally culpable.
Well said. Contempt for the average user makes it easy to forget one's humanity.
You did so well until the last few sentences. Casually throwing everyone under the bus as idiots isn't a great move.
To be blunt, there's a lot of tech noobs out there that have always been, and will always be, fairly bad with technology. There's an even larger number that can't be bothered to pay attention or care about it. And finally, there's the enthusiasts and the tech savvy, most of whom are working in a tech related field (or want to). Special shout out to the enthusiasts who don't work in a tech field who are still quite savvy. But let's face it, the enthusiasts and the tech savvy are a minority. We are not their targets. Fact is, even if you're using Google's various services or Chrome or whatever, the tech literate are at least aware of what's happening, and a nontrivial number of them are here. Including you and I.
It then becomes our job to save others from themselves and get them away from the products looking to harm them. Throwing in the towel and calling everyone neaderthals isn't the way to accomplish this. If we all do our part, we can save those we care about from becoming yet another battery in the machine, with all their data flowing through one company. It's our duty.
For those that REALLY want to help, get involved in local politics and be the change. Help push regulation on the corporate shills that want it all. Whether that's running for office, or contacting your local representative or whatever, it's something that should be done. They shouldn't be allowed to just implement, what is essentially mass surveillance on the world without someone doing something about it. That's what the government is supposed to be there to do. I'll reserve my comments about how effective they've been in the past or how corrupt the whole system is, because that will vary from country to country. But bluntly, you can be that change by getting involved.
As to the comments about the general idiocy of the population of earth, I say this: do you know it all? Well, neither do they. Nobody does. Can you fix your car and then turn around and frame a shed from scratch? Me neither. Can you perform experiments to discover new and exciting things in quantum physics, then build a toaster from raw materials? Me neither. Can you fix your plumbing, then create a program in Pascal that does your taxes for you? Me neither. Everyone has their skills, talents and expertise. Simply because there is a large percentage of people whose expertise is not tech, doesn't, and shouldn't, invalidate their intelligence as an individual.
Check yourself, or the next time you have a problem you don't know how to fix, people might just throw in the towel on helping you.
We really need more browser engines floating around.
As of now we really only have 3, Webkit,
FirefoxGecko, andChromiumBlink.Everything is based on these 3. And I know, technically chromium and firefox are both based on webkit, but they're so far gone from webkit they function as their own engines.
Firefox isn't based on WebKit. Maybe you're thinking Safari.
Ultimately you really only have KHTML (what Webkit was forked from), Gecko, Triton (IE classic), and I can't recall what the new (now dead) engine in IE11 was called. The rest are forks, mostly of Webkit/KHTML.
I guess there's Ladybird and Servo too, but they are a way still from being used as a daily driver.
I doubt that's what they meant since Safari currently uses WebKit. But yeah, maybe they meant how WebKit is a fork of KHTML and Chrome is a fork of WebKit.
tbh i think it would be better if there was a single collaborative engine instead, owned by a non-profit company like The Linux Foundation
maybe the W3C could establish their own but idk if they even do anything these days
https://xkcd.com/927
Webkit is the only browser engine in that list; the other 2 are browsers, not engines. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. Chrome/chromium use Blink engine.
Don't Be Evil!
Google recently revised that motto, it now has a comma after the first word.
Ironically, in the past year, one of my employers specifically disallowed Firefox due to a CVE, saying that we were to use Chrome. A Cybersecurity professional once told me that Firefox is frowned upon because of CVEs.
This has been rampant for years now.
There was a massive movement years ago to get every user on Chrome. Even going so far as to replace all appearances of IE with Chrome, then change the Chrome desktop icon to the IE icon, then tell the users it’s a new better version of IE.
Are you alluding to Edge becoming a chromium fork? Or did some orgs really do this weird icon trickery?
Not orgs,..exactly.
There was a huge push by a lot of IT and tech based people to get behind and push promotion of Chrome over Firefox and IE. FF had its issues at the time and seemingly everyone trusted Google to no end (ashamedly myself included).
I’m gonna say this really started to happen ~2010 or so.
I wish I could find some of the old Reddit threads and memeing that happened surrounding it all.
Things like this were everywhere:
https://ny02208580.schoolwires.net/Page/5238
^^^Mobile screenshot for posterity^^^
May I ask what specific CVE and when your professional told you that?
I don't recall the CVE, it was likely months ago, and I wasn't in a position to argue.
The Cyber guy said that a few years ago (3?).
What is a CVE?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures
not being a jerk, just in a hurry
The new McAfee.
Way ahead of you. Been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix.
If I'm forced to use a Chrome browser, I use a deGoogled version of chromium. I can't think of the last time I've had to use it though. Firefox support is a priority for my company's IT dept.
since netscape navigator here. even used netscape during the dark ages (when aol controlled it).
I was so happy when Netscape 4.0 released for OS/2.
My main problem is that I prefer other frontends to Firefox. I mostly use Vivaldi and think it's great, but of course it's Chromium based. I read somewhere that it's just way easier to base a browser on Chrome than it is to base one on Firefox. It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That's not how it (currently) works though.
There are Firefox forks, but they're just that: forks with slight modifications. Vivaldi and Arc are basically completely different browsers. Even Orion isn't based on Gecko, it's based on WebKit.
Add to that small compatibility issues with certain websites/web apps that aren't Firefox' fault, but rather developers targeting Chrome instead of "100 % web standards". Still, as a user you'll likely into (small) issues from time to time.
People saying "just use Firefox" have a very narrow view on how any of this works and I sometimes feel like it's some form of elitism where the cool kids use Firefox and everybody using anything else are "lesser people". In reality, people have different requirements and priorities. It's similar to people posting "just use Linux" under every article talking about problems with Windows.
Yes, Chrome and Google sucks, I agree, but there isn't a single universal solution to this problem.
No, not at all. I understand perfectly. Your concerns are valid.
Our point is not supporting Chrome is more important in the long run.
There is no front end in the world that will make up for the loss of true ad blocking and everything else Google pushes down the line.
Let's be clear about this:
I don't want to tell you to use Firefox. I want to tell you to use whatever you like. I wish we lived in a world where the choice didn't matter.
But we don't
When I'm telling people to use firefox, I'm telling them if you have a problem with the direction the internet is going in, you actually have to do something about it beyond just complaining. Support the competition, the only non-profit in the space, and the only true alternative browser left. Because everything is going to get exponentially worse without competition, and we really really need to preserve the one remaining safe refuge.
What features does Vivaldi have that don't exist in a FF extension?
And using a WebKit based browser is still better than using a chromium fork.
I don't know. I still prefer having vertical tabs, tab grouping, workspaces, web panels, proper loading information, full page screenshots and way more integrated in my browser instead of having to rely on possibly dozens of different extensions that in my testing never provided nearly as good of an experience.
Implementation details matter.
Also mouse gestures and tab tiling. Vivaldi has so many useful features baked in that I don't want to give up.
Vertical tabs: Sidebery. It might actually be better than the Vivaldi native. I havent used vivaldi with vertical tabs that much, its just a work/secondary browser for me.
Gestures: Gesturify. This is just better than the vivaldi native one.
Tab tiling: well you got me on this one. This is actually pretty neat.
To be clear, I like vivaldi as well, it is my chromium of choice but with the above two extensions firefox is chefs kiss.
I'll take a look, thanks. I'm not thrilled with the idea of using a dozen extensions that could break or become incompatible, but I would prefer to get off of chrome!
For me it is only 5 extensions really which are essential. uBlock Origin, Dark reader, Sidebery & Gesturify & User agent switcher (it can come in handy every once in a while).
P.S. There is a little caveat to vertical tabs which i forgot. You have to follow an easy 5 step guide on how to hide horizontal tabs when sidebery is active.
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Im sorry, but dont know what you are refering to. Could you elaborate?
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You can get vertical tabs on firefox with custom userChrome.css but it is a nightmare to setup and mozilla is only interested on breaking userChrome with every update lol.
tell me about it! literally the ONE thing keeping me from FF at the moment. vertical tabs are too vital to my workflow at this point to sacrifice.
I don't know exactly how to do it, I know you can because when I was in the firefoxcss subreddit there were many posts on how people came up with their own solutions for vertical tabs.
I wanted vertical tabs to save on screenspace, for some reason the default firefox has the biggest top bar of all browsers and it is horrible, this is the userChrome.css that I use, it does what I wanted but it is not vertical tabs:
https://imgur.com/h39dsHL.png
https://pastebin.com/r54QRbKx
It is also keyboard centric, I also had to install an extension because firefox (and this only happens on linux) uses alt+number to switch between tabs instead of control+number.
check out Floorp: https://floorp.app/en/
I could never get hardware accelerated video working with Firefox on my Linux laptop, and Google Meet (used for work) doesn't work well ( but I guess I blame Google for that).
Google meet sucks hard on every browser and piece of hardware I've thrown at it.
Why is using WebKit-based browser “better” than Chromium-based one? Neither supports Google’s monopoly. Vivaldi is not just a skin for Google Chrome, it continues to support manifest v2 extensions and proper adblockers. And the company is owned by the workers, which is super cool
I tried really hard to use Floorp which fixes most of my problems with stock Firefox but even that just showed me how excellent Vivaldi is compared to other browsers.
Arc has floated this idea. Currently Arc is Chromium-based, but they say they've designed it to allow for swapping engines in the future.
IIRC, Edge had a similar feature for a while, allowing you to run legacy Internet Explorer tabs if a site required it. Not sure if that still exists.
Let me add that support for passkeys is becoming more and more important and Firefox doesn't support passkeys. Yes, it supports forms of WebAuthn (YubiKey and the likes), but not "scan this QR code with your smartphone and use biometric authentication to sign in".
I’m glad I’m in a position to basically never have to touch a chrome or chrome derivative for my work. It was a necessary evil to finally kill internet explorer, but these days it’s just hostile to its users.
I've been using Firefox since somewhere around 2008, it's been a dream the whole time.
Highly recommended
Tiny devils advocate, IF we can make it so ONLY Google can spy on us and
malwareadware can NOT spy on us would be an “improvement”. Google is a lot easier to target with regulation and stuff.That said, I wouldn’t touch Google with a 10 foot pole.
You're not wrong. One spy is better than 1+x spies, especially if that one spy is well controlled with regulation. Better than bad is still not necessarily good.
It's a false dichotomy. We can't make it so only Google can spy on us, and conceding to Google has no impact on other malware. Besides, it's the largest advertising company in the world by a large margin, with a near monopoly on online advertising. It probably wouldn't even make a difference.
Oh, no, no, no, it can look like a good thing, but it's terrible. If google gets the "spying monopoly", they will have such power in their hands that they will be able to, alone, to things like manipulate your habits and routine, decide when you should replace your electronics, manipulate elections, markets, and so much more. It can seem, at first, that it would be easier to "just block google and that's it" or "just let the governments regulate them", but in reality, they would create a scenario where you couldn't even browse the web or use simple tech devices without being logged in in a "safety-something compatible device", while lobbying heavily to do so.
They're already trying to go that way. With a monopoly, they would simply have no resistance at all.
Thanks for the reminder. I've switched to Firefox on my mac and iphone for personal use. I just need to move some web development stuff around so I can switch to Firefox on that too. I may even uninstall google chrome, but for now I've just taken it off the task bar.
Correct me if I am wrong but arent Apple based browsers all modifications of WebKit/Safari?
Or is it a iOS/iPad OS specific thing and MacOS is actually free from those restrictions by being able to sideload.
That's exclusive to iOS/iPad OS. There aren't any such restrictions on macOS.
Neat to know. Thank you :)
MacOS is actually much more open than most people think. There’s a lot of protections for the average user but if you know what you’re doing it can all be bypassed.
I came back to firefox after vivaldi and edge when google announced manifestv3, decided to do it already since they would at best delay it instead of canceling it, and that's exactly what they did.
Yeah yeah, Mozilla pays its clueless CEO and other execs way too much, mismanages its finances in general, fired the wrong people, fell for the hype about AI, has a board full of former Facebook and Twitter execs, relies excessively on telemetry to justify their worst UI design decisions, and occasionally has delusions about someday becoming an ad platform.
If it weren't for all that we'd all be better off. But sometimes you gotta vote for the lesser evil, and at least they don't do all this shit.
The one feature that I really liked that's still in chromium other than Google cast is still Web Apps.
I like to be able to make a desktop application out of a web page. Firefox has this feature with PRISM a while back. Did it ever come back?
Firefox main since 2020. Love it.
While I agree on this, I think Ungoogled Chromium could be a soft way to degoogle yourself while maybe looking for complete replacements. It took me almost 2 weeks to degoogle me almost totally, at the beginning having a minimum of compatibility is nice
The only Google thing holding me back from full degoogling is YouTube, but with how garbage the platform is becoming, especially with the algorithm just going berserk and it probably not being long until I start being affected by the adblock-block, I think moving away from it is only going to be easier than ever before.
serious question: what do for email if you've been a gmail user for .... (checks notes) ... almost 20 years? self hosted?
honest question. I'm interested, but really have no idea what my options are when I've had the same email address for half my life / all of my adult life.
Proton Mail as others have suggested is the easy and privacy friendly solution, and probably set an auto forwarding rule from your gmail account to your new Proton Mail.
Otherwise I haven't self hosted my own email but from my previous attempts it seemed like it's quite involved
Protonmail does have a problem with often being classified as a temporary email provider. Some websites refuse to allow registrations using protonmail emails. Solution is to not use those websites.
I'm yet to run into that myself (2+ year user of it) but I would believe that
Fastmail with a custom domain. It’s great, and has a nice migration tool for moving everything over from Gmail. Also integrates nicely with 1Password for personalized email addresses for each service I sign up for, which I can nuke as needed if needed.
awesome, thanks for that! I'll look into it.
I personally use mailbox.org for emails and anonaddy for aliases
Not married to my email and I bought my own domain.
The only hard part is switching all accounts to the new domain (and finding out that some IT/dev departments decided that changing emails doesnt happen at all).
I pay a company a bit too much money so I don't have to worry about self hosting.
Self hosting email is pretty much impossible nowadays. You have to use your hosting service servers at a minimum. But a dedicated email service will probably have better spam handling (although that's possibly not as bad as it once was).
Countermail.com if you manage to get an invite
Very cool. Thanks
Since I feel you, and since I have a lot of nice subs on youtube, I feel like suggesting something like Piped as a privacy focus frontend or, if you are more of a standalone app person, FreeTube as a privacy focus client.
Technically we are still using YouTube, but at least there is less food for the algo.
Or just use Firefox...?
I have switched to Firefox but I'm having a hard time. Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome and uses an insane amount of memory. And I really miss tab groups as Chrome had them. There are some add-ons for Firefox that try to imitate this feature but none of them has everything I want (e.g. the ability to collapse a group in the top tab bar). And most of them build on top of Firefox tab groups which come with an isolation feature I don't want (and haven't found a way to disable for tab groups).
Vivaldi user since 2015. Never looked back.
Firefox user since ever. Never looked anywhere.
Vivaldi is Chromium under the hood.
I use Chrome on the rare occasion when I have no choice but to use FB. Always with VPN. Otherwise it's FF.
Why use Chrome for Facebook? The Facebook container sufficiently isolates it.
Good point, old habits from before the FB container existed.
The number of tab crashes in Firefox is way higher than it ever should be. I still use it but it's def not as stable as the chrome stuff.
What are you using that makes it crash, virtually never happens to me.
For me Firefox crashes all the time in normal use. I am talking minimum twice a day. It also has this weird problem where it will pin one thread to 100% and lock up the whole browser when downloading files. I also had to disable video hardware acceleration or else Twitch crashes every 5-10 minutes but luckily my CPU is so strong that it's not too big of a deal to do software decoding.
I still use it out of principle but it has been a way worse experience than Chromium ever was for me.
Yeah…I’m gonna say you have something that isn’t playing well with Firefox. Extensions, hardware…. I’ve been using Firefox for years now across multiple OS’s and hardware and I’ve never had anything like this happen to me
I have privacy badger, ublock, dark reader, tab session manager, bitwarden, and grease monkey(that is used to tweak hacker News).
I guess I could try to turn off ublock and privacy badger to see if that fixes anything, but the other extensions seem way less invasive and less likely to be the culprit.
But browsing without ublock seems miserable.
hardly any issues here, either. and we abuse tf out of firefox.. 300+ tabs? stay open for days on end? multiple addons? on c2d-era desktops? no problem.
No idea. Nothing crazy. Twitch is one that's fairly regular but it happens seemingly randomly with normal browsing. It hasn't happened on mobile as far as I remember.
I send in each crash report so hopefully they'll be able to sort it out.
For me I had to disable video hardware acceleration (just video, not all acceleration) for Twitch to stop crashing all the time.
I haven't seen that happen in possibly two years, let alone regularly.
I use Firefox all day on both Mac and Windows and this rarely happens. It does seem to happen on Linux for me sometimes though.
Ok so I really wanna switch, but I need to have multiple Gmail accounts active at the same time for work, as we have various logins tied to various profiles. From what I can tell Firefox doesn't yet support multiple profiles being active at the same time. Do I have any options here? I need to be able to access the support inbox and login to our platform, while simultaneously being logged in to my own email and my platform login. Chrome profiles makes this easy, annoyingly.
Yes you can. With container tabs.
Since nobody linked it, here you go: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
It's actually super useful.
you can do this within gmail and also using the multi account containers in firefox
Not only do I do that, I have also created separate desktop icons for each Firefox profile
Yes you can. With Firefox containers.
I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.
I post Contra Chrome every time Chrome and spyware are mentioned, but I'll post it here again.
I use Firefox at home and on my phone. I still use chrome at work because of habit and because that's what most users use. Some of the other guys use Firefox anyway. Its dev tools seem fine.