Firefox

It has always felt so goofy to see people say "x" based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google's money but "x" based Chromium browser doesn't. Like... It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google's money into Firefox equals bad, but Google's money into Chromium, oh, that's actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or something???

All that to say, I'm glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.

When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn't like the UI (still don't) and didn't see the point of it.

People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?

I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.

Honestly it's more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.

I've best heard it described as: people love Firefox to death.

People, use whatever you like, but if you actively discourage everyone to stop using it, we might lose it - and with it, Librewolf, Palemoon, Tor Browser, and everything that's not Chrome or Safari.

I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.

One thing to note about using forks is that they have no chance of being on corporate software whitelists, while firefox does. For that reason, adding to firefox numbers is potentially important. I've already seen companies wanting to only allow chrome/edge/safari (even while they officially support firefox ..)

For mobile, there is Fennec, which is just Firefox with those elements removed.

Edit: there is also Mull, which is more privacy focused.

Use forks

I've been using FF for more years than I care to remember, and with the exception of a couple of sites that weren't really that important, I've never had an issue. I certainly never had an issue running uBlock Origin and YouTube.

I flat out refuse to use anything even loosely based on Chromium on principal alone.

People like to bemoan the funding model, as well as the Mozilla Foundations broad overview and general "business vibe"

There's a few irritating ones on Android at least.

On desktop it's been solid since Quantum

Yeah same.

People on here love to go all doomposting on every little thing though, so for them stuff that they'll never actively interact with is automatically horrible. But them, I bet those very people are the ones that do "proper privacy stuff" like blindly turning on hardening settings, and then in turn also complain that Firefox "keeps making FF use more memory and be slower and not load pages properly" when they have changed so many settings that they'd in turn make a compelling case for why most companies don't allow so much fiddling with settings: It just leads to endless complaints.

At that point the forks will become its own thing and depart from Firefox.

Which is ironically and exactly how Firefox came to be.

Netscape fucked up Navigator, some folks forked Navigator and created Phoenix - which then was renamed to Firebird, then Firefox. And somewhere in that timeline the Mozilla foundation ditched Navigator in favor of the fork.

I couldn't help, so let me ask What about firefox stops you from using it for online shopping?

For shopping? That can also be done via Firefox.

You're being downvoted by clueless people.