A lot of false equivocating has been made regarding Mozilla and actual surveillance capitalism firms like Google and Microsoft. Mozilla remains, in my mind, the least of all evils with an organization capable of supporting a modern web browser as well as other projects.
I remember when Netscape was abandoned and open-sourced as Mozilla, and it was huge and bloated as slow as hell. And out of that came a project to just pull out the browser part of Mozilla and make it super fast and as portable. I remember a series of early alphas, and even the name went through a few evolutions. First it was called Phoenix, then Firebird, briefly, until they realised Firebird was taken and changed it to Firefox. It had this shiny new Gecko rendering engine and its only rival was IE...5?
When I started my first dev job in 2006, Firefox was far and away the best browser to use because it had an extension that no other browser could match: Firebug. Firebug was the precursor to the standard F12 devtools that every browser now has and it was life-changing if you were a web developer. (Try imagine doing your job without it now.)
Then Chrome arrived and it was shiny and W3C compliant (yay!) and you could pull a tab off into a separate window (wow!) and every tab ran as a separate process (neat!) and Google wouldn't be evil for at least another decade. Back then, FF had memory leak problems and that drove a lot of us away.
And then Chrome pulled this ad surveillance shit and I was fucking out. I'm so glad that FF is still here.
I let myself be fully engulfed by the Google/Chrome/Android continuum and it's only recently that I realised just how much of myself I gave away and, while my personal data has long since been propagated to a million servers, I'd still like to try keep some of myself to myself.
Because of FoxyGestures, I can't find a good replacement for this on Chromium based browsers.
Because of uBlock Origin, Firefox has the full version, on mobile too.
Because Google Chrome can scan my files system for “malware” and improving their ad data, in other words their spying goes too far.
Because of the customisability of the UI.
Because I can tweak every variable (visit about:config)
Because if you turn telemetry off, it's actually off, Google lies about that.
Because Google's market share is so big, that they have the guts to try and DRM the entire Internet for their browser, no company should have that much power.
Because it's what my father installed and set as default on all PCs. By the point I had my own and could have made the decision myself, I was just so used to it that I didn't wanna switch.
Because IE sucked, Netscape was dead, and I was a contrarian little 20 year old who downloaded this new weird shit called "Firebird" to be different from everyone else which then turned into Firefox and then I just kinda kept using it. But I had tabbed browsing like five years before everyone else thought it was cool.
It's a combination of FireFox being the least shit and the most functional option, really. Still kind of shit by default, so I go for Librewolf. Also I've been using it since Firebird.
Librewolf just gives me more sane defaults. Saves me trouble of having to dig in to about:config and trying to figure out what needs to be changed. Generally its releases follow FireFox in reasonable time. A few updates have messed things up, but it's rare. I guess the big thing is that Librewolf saves me some effort.
Same I never felt I had to change browsers. Firefox was the fastest internet browser. Even though it's not anymore, I use it for the sake of familiarity. But with the change of Firefox's selling point as being the most privacy-friendly, it made it all the more better!
I've used Chrome since the beginning and moved from Firefox. I've been happy. I'd still be happy but now I'm back on Firefox because of Google's intentions. It's led me to start to move away from Google as a whole. Moved my emails and search to DuckDuckGo.
It's going to be hard to move away from other services. Maps and YouTube for example.
i used to write reviews for restaurants on goog many years ago.
recently i've gotten mails from google, saying they had been contacted by restaurants who claim they don't know me and my review is fraudulent. google wants me to prove i had been there (7 years ago, paid cash) or they'll delete the review.
so all my reviews are gone, as well as any trust in that content. google reviews are garbage.
userChrome.css, vertical tabs, better integration with the host system than Vivaldi or Edge, and support for fling scrolling that's not insanely fast on touchpads.
+1 for the Tree Style Tabs extension. There's nothung quite like it on any other browser (thougb I heard vivaldi does something similar? I'll try that, but it's still chr*mium, so not for me)
I really tried to switch to FF, but I need my vertical tabs, side-by-side/sidebar view and power user keyboard shortcuts.
I tried to use Tree Style Tabs, but that uses FF's sidebar view and I need the sidebar for other things too. There's a use case where I like to have two tabs open side by side, and the best way I found to do it in FF is the extension "Open in sidebar". But that overwrites the tree style tabs view, so I can either use vertical tabs or display websites in the sidebar, but not both at the same time! Not to mention that when I drag a tab out from a window, the website opened in the sidebar is carried over to the new window with it, which is infuriating! Also, Tree Style Tabs is so damn wide.
Another pet peeve is that searching in open tabs is not trivial. When you want to search in the titles of your open tabs with the goal of switching to it, you need to:
Focus the address bar (e.g. Ctrl+L)
Type % (Shift+5, Space)
Write the name of the open tab and press Arrow Down and Enter to switch to it
Which is just too many steps for this use case to be efficient, and I do this a lot in other browsers!
Despite all the privacy problems and other issues, Edge:
supports vertical tabs natively, with an option to only display a thin panel with only the tab favicons and display a wider view with the tab titles on hover
has a sidebar view on the right that I can use to display my utility tab, and it can be used with vertical tabs active; or I can open two tabs side by side in one browser window
when I drag a tab out or open a new browser window, the sidebar view is closed in the new window by default, which is what I want
searching in open tabs and switching to them is as easy as a single hotkey to bring up the search, type name, press Enter
I like the idea of switching to FF and ditching Chromium very much, but these things are deal breakers for me and they're why I have to stay with Edge for now...
I really like the developer tools. I always the install the developer edition (which is basically just the beta) and I find the defaults and menus more intuitive than Chrome’s, though at this point, they’re probably at feature parity. I could probably get Chrome to work how I want by changing settings but why? It’s not faster or better at this point.
I have ideological reasons too but honestly, the main reason is just that I like Firefox better. As a developer, it’s also nice to have Chromium (or Google Chrome) completely clean. If there’s a bug I can’t recreate in Firefox, I can open Chrome with no extensions or cache. Since that’s sort of the “default” for most users, it’s nice to keep my daily driver separate.
A major reason for me is manifest v3 and other shenanigans designed to neuter ad blockers. Secondary to that is promoting web renderer diversity - as a web dev I don't want to go back to the days where we could only afford to cater to one engine - chromium / blink in this case.
It's not chrome / chrome-based. We need to have any choice. As Chrome is very, very loved by corporations, and Firefox hated... it means that for personal use it's the best browser available.
For me, it's not as memory efficient as something like Edge, but it handles having a lot of tabs open much better. It also has a lot of powerful features under the hood, and some really good power user addons, like Tab Groups.
Because it's NOT Google and Firefox not embracing WebBundles or the “Web Integrity API” standard from Google. Google want to INTRODUCE DRM on the web.
And just recently YouTube (==Google) now also have very strict medical policy, so it can only follow the WHO guidelines. Google is evil, look out. Even Dr. Eric Berg is getting censored. Look out people.
Many reasons. Many of which is down to how Google as a company is reaching between the proverbial couch cushions to get at the loose change to make a profit. Default opt-in tracking, breaking ad-blockers, and probably more which I forgot about since I abandoned Chrome years ago.
Originally I started to use it because I'd heard there was a new update to its rendering engine that made it feel faster/better than chrome. After testing it out I did think it felt better at the very least. Now I'm using it mostly for the same reasons and to reduce my dependence on Google/Chrome.
It doesn't suck and just works. Really well customizable and adblocking/ security is better than what chrome has turned into. Chrome used to be decent but is garbage now. I'd rather use edge before chrome.
I've been using Firefox since 2002 when it first became available, at that point it was called Mozilla. It's definitely the browser that I've used the most in about 25 years of browsing the Internet from home. Firefox has a great native Linux version and seems to be widely promoted by most distros. Since switching to Linux seven years ago I also started using Chromium (not to be confused with Chrome) and Opera, both of which also have great native Linux versions.
I was shown it by a mate, along with soulseek, in like, 2006 or so when in sixth form. It was way better than what I was using at the time (IE)
At least that's what I remember, pretty sure that was the date. I remember soulseek was before by a bit actually as we used it for trading At the Drive In and Mars Volta tracks
I've carried on using it because of plugins, adblocks, privacy, etc.
Firefox supports a font technology for less common scripts, Graphite, that the for-profit-corporate browsers do not. I use one of those scripts once in a great while. So I'm locked in until OpenType has better support.
When someone built a form that for some reasons doesn’t work with Safari. Or when watching streaming sites with pop ups (FF full screen is really nice in the recent update).
I’d use it more, but I rely on iCloud password management built into safari across my family’s devices and handoff/tab groups to manage tabs across them.
Vivaldi is my main browser of choice but Firefox is my backup. I'm logged into both and have sync enabled and have them installed on Linux and my Android.
If a site doesn't work on Vivaldi, I'll try it on FF.
Trust. I think it has been earned - so far. NCSA Mosaic was my second browser, and while I've experimented with all the major browsers and many not-so-major contenders over the interim couple of decades, Firefox has been a constant for me ever since it was first spawned off of Mozilla. I still believe the Firefox team when they say things, and so far that has worked out just fine.
Nowadays, a "freedom-respecting" and/or a "privacy-respecting" browser became a myth. Even so, a buzzword. If you believe theres such browser, you are delusional.
Downvotes are under this post for your self-validation needs.