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'Why I'm Switching From Chrome To Firefox and You Should Too' (fastcodesign.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design:
While the amount of data about me may not have caused harm in my life yet -- as far as I know -- I don't want to be the victim of monopolistic internet oligarchs as they continue to cash in on surveillance-based business models. What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox... [W]hy should I continue to use the company's browser, which acts as literally the window through which I experience much of the internet, when its incentives -- to learn a lot about me so it can sell advertisements -- don't align with mine....?
Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster...
Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't.
The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar.
"But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."
Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster...
Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't.
The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar.
"But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."
>" What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox."
Many of us, myself included, have NEVER used Chrome and still use Firefox on all our systems. Yes, that is a no-brainer if you value your privacy.
In the earlier days of Chrome, Firefox performance stagnated and Chrome was fast and lean. But that was less of a concern to many of us. Still, many switched primarily for that reason (with apparently no concern about closed binaries and privacy). Well, that reason is certainly gone now!
Oh, and make sure to not use http://google.com/ for searching.... another no-brainer. I would recommend http://startpage.com/ or similar. Same results, no tracking.
If you use the internet you're already a victim of surveillance
FTFY
Vivaldi?
Firefox is kind of bloated and their leadership is succumbing to the "we must be politically active" bullshit.
Brave is still a work in progress, I refuse to use browsers that send tracking information directly to the big data companies so edge and chrome are out. I didn't realize that opera had been sold to the chinese so that can be assumed to be spyware.
The picken's are getting slim. Any others out there?
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
While absolutely non-profits can and are actively abused in different ways, they are generally orders of magnitude better than the abuse from most full corporations (as I type this from a Google Chrome window...). Mozilla has faults for sure, but they are not baked in quite like Google's faults. As they mentioned, Google is an ad company and always has been. Sure, they have created a bunch of cool stuff and back in the early days they were probably just the legit nerdy people wanting to build awesome things for people to use while using the ad dollars to fund their passion. Problem is somewhere along the lines that was lost (probably around that billion dollar net worth mark...) and they realized they could use these cool things they built to create a greater ad platform that made lots of money and that not just some companies would use, but all companies would use. This honestly became even more evident when they reorganized into Alphabet as the parent company and Google being made a sub-entity with an advertisement focus (notice how the browser, Gmail, Android, etc. were not split off into their own companies or non-profit foundations? Yea, there is a reason for that...).
I've been toying with the idea of getting off the Google teet at least a bit myself simply because they have become significantly less trust-worthy over the past 5 years, arguably decade. Problem I am running into is the alternatives are not too stellar and the migration process is PAINFUL. I migrated to Gmail from Yahoo since Yahoo made clear they hired a bunch of 10 year olds to manage their security and that was rough as hell. I would honestly like to switch to Proton Mail or a self hosted solution now, but I dread going through all of that again.
Then phone-wise, as much as I loathe Apple, I have to give them credit that they are actually taking privacy practices pretty seriously. Playing into the greater point though, guess why? Apple is a hardware business and has been since forever. They can afford to do it, because that was never their business model, unlike Google who was doing advertising from the start (which relies heavily on knowing your demographics). The problem is that no one else provides a flexible phone OS like Android and I really don't want to start installing custom ROMs...
Now browser might be something I could do reasonably without too much pain. We have real competition in the browser space (though all of them have their issues) and I genuinely feel like Mozilla is much better than Google at this point (note BETTER not necessarily good...).
And I’ll be staying away. Philosophically, I’m more closely aligned with the Mozilla folks than with people like Eich - but Mozilla demonstrated that bullying and intolerance exist on both sides of the political spectrum, and I’m not going to overlook it just because their on “my” side.
So, for me, the only viable choice is Safari. I have to keep Chrome and Firefox around for testing, but they’re limited to that role.
#DeleteChrome
I'm glad Mozilla is politically active. They have done a lot to improve the internet, especially regarding privacy and security. With the W3C the way it is and Google/Microsoft having corporate interests we need someone like Mozilla to advocate for our interests.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
WTF is with people dumping on Firefox? It used to be slow and bloated, until the release of Quantum. With Quantum, Firefox is at least as fast as Chrome. Pre-quantum, having many tabs open was guaranteed to bring my computer to its knees. Post quantum, opening many tabs is no problem.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Mozilla is dead to me.
... Well, if that's the line you want to draw then what isn't dead to you? Is your son using Seamonkey now?
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
The noscirpt dev had plenty of time to get his shit together before the update, it's not like Mozilla didn't tell people about this. At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
Well some people care more about the features their plugins add that don't yet exist post-57, or in most cases will never exist because of WebExtensions limits Mozilla refuses to allow workarounds for, than they care that pages load in 2 seconds instead of 4 seconds, sometimes. Their arrogance in killing off a large part of the plugin capabilities that made Firefox great, continually dumbing down the interface and copying Chrome, and telling the large majority of their userbase opposed to this 'fuck off you'll want what we tell you to want', makes the dumping richly deserved.
Just thought I'd chime in and say that performance- and feature-wise Firefox is one of the top browsers, along with Chrome, which however because of it's much better policies and intentions I definitely prefer Firefox.
Yes the upgrade to Quantum was not completely smooth. I notice that many Quantum-compatible addons are not as flawless as pre-Quantum ones, but overall performance is vastly better. For the better performance and stability the tradeoff seems worth it although one hopes that the addon quality will improve more over time.
Are you kidding? Do you know how many attack vectors Firefox 57 closed compared to your loss of noscript for a week? Apparently, you don't.
Noscript closes all attack vectors except those that I deliberately allow.
In all the years I had been using noscript, and the 3 years my kids have been using it, our machines had never been compromised. In 1 week without Noscript, my seven year old son managed to get his computer obliterated. This may be anecdotal, but even still it is compelling.
I can't say that I care for chrome, and Google has a track record of some pretty evil shit for a "don't be evil" company, but its still has a better track record in my eyes than Mozilla. Even if that weren't the case, there is still Chromium, which I now use everywhere.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted