When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions Iâd grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once Iâd weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesnât?
My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it âisnât officially supportedâ or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). Itâs only certain websites that donât want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didnât want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Googleâs-world
Only one I missed was PushBullet, it was the easiest way to text from browser and get articles from phone/computer. Nothing I've tried on Firefox has worked as well
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don't buy the argument that it's easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It's not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they'll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine's direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! đ
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
It really doesn't matter what Firefox'es codebase is though. To a web developer it's a black box. It may as well be COBOL. So long as enough people use it and it behaves differently to a web developer than Google's Chromium or Chrome, the goal you mentioned is achieved. This is why I don't buy this argument.
I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately "designed for Chrome" is a thing now, and got sick of Google's bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I've tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don't play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft's playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Brave is the only browser I know that can play youtube videos in the background on mobile. Please tell me another browser that can do that. The UX is just really good.