this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Had been using Brave for 4 years. Switched from it to Firefox after the Google DRM news came out. Firefox is awesome!
I never liked Brave. The whole "allow ads to get awards" thing doesn't sit right with me. The only adblockers that do that are the ones that are in bed with the ad companies. Firefox with UBlock Origin and NoScript is all you need.
(I mean, there are other good addons for privacy as well, but it's easy to go down a rabbit hole and next thing you know you have 30 different extensions installed and websites are breaking. Then you have to start disabling things one-by-one until you find the culprit. Setting your security settings in FF to "Strict" and using those two addons should be good enough without going overboard.)
Edit: only thing that sucks about Firefox is that it still doesn't support HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution yet, so in the meantime I use the "Open in Chromium" browser extension when I'm watching videos on YouTube, so that they display properly with all the enhancements.
I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I'm very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.
I've been able to sidestep the entire rat race between ublock and Twitch trying to force ads thanks to NoScript. I block amazon-adsystem.com through NoScript, and I haven't seen a single ad on Twitch in over a decade.
I'm an avid YouTube watcher on Firefox. What does HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution do?
HDR is High Dynamic Range. Makes your monitor more colorful and realistic, closer to what you see in real life. Bright scenes are brighter, colors are more vibrant and accurate (for example, you can actually see teal properly with an HDR monitor, which normal monitors can't display accurately). Requires a compatible monitor. You would know if you had one cause most people don't spend extra money on a display unless they know/care about this feature.
RTX Video Super Resolution uses AI to sharpen and upscale lower resolution video. It's useful for watching 1080p videos on a 4K monitor. Or for watching 720p videos at 1080-quality because your internet sucks and can't handle 1080p. Requires an Nvidia RTX graphics card (again, you would know if you had one cause they're expensive and meant for PC gamers).
Basically I'm complaining about features that only enthusiasts care about, but Chrome supports them so why not Firefox too?
Sounds pretty cool! Why is this done at browser level and not at window manager level?
Beats me. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ That is a good point. Why isn't this shit done at the window manager level? Fucking Microsoft. Wish I could switch to Linux but it doesn't even support HDR at all.
That'd explain why I had had never heard about it, lol. Hopefully the Wayland folks are working on it.
Recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 support auto HDR, You can enable HDR in the display settings, and it works for pretty much everything. I've never noticed that Firefox lacks native HDR support, because Windows does compensate. The only time it doesn't is when older games use exclusive fullscreen mode, and then auto-HDR still works as long as I tell them to run in a window and use borderless windowed mode.
When Google chrome was released in 2008, I read about it in a tech magazine and it described how much it’s going to be spying on you. I was immediately put off by it, and decided not to install it. At the time I wondered why would anyone ever install this junk. Oh boy, was I in for a surprise! Pretty much everyone installed it, and within the next 10 years chrome had become the most popular browser.
Obviously, I never switched from FF.
Imagine if everyone started using a browser made by an advertising company, such that they pretty much had complete control of the way we use and view the web.
Better yet, imagine a social gathering place where people are encouraged to share everything about themselves, but the place is actually tun by an advertising company. Oh what, that actually happened.
Hello fellow Firefox lifer. It's been awesome!
Made the same switch on my phone recently.
Make sure to install plugins like ublock origin. Firefox still supports this and a few other plugins on mobile, like Bitwarden etc.
Yep, ublock being available was the thing that made the change possible. Just wish I had my multi account containers but I can live without that on my phone.
If only someone would put the Firefox over the earth like the logo, that would be epic.