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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."
Try Palemoon instead.
Have you forgotten what the Firefox dolts did with their stupid Mr. Robot promo plugin?
>" 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.
I have been a Firefox user since before it was called Firefox, starting with the first buggy milestones during the final days of Netscape. I never bought into the whole Chrome thing as it had that distinct Internet Explorer feel to it.
Then, when Firefox Quantum rolled around, I saw myself forced to jump ship if I wanted to keep using the plugins and extensions I had come to rely on, including some extensions which I had written myself, but could not be ported to WebExtensions due to missing APIs.
That's when I decided to switch to Pale Moon, which is essentially a Firefox fork, but with significant differences, far less cruft and a truly free and open source model, without commercial involvement, like with Mozilla.
The Basilisk browser is the current preview of the next iteration of Pale Moon, and it will add some new features to Pale Moon, but retain the lean, low memory profile nature. I could honestly not be happier and would recommend that others switch to Pale Moon, Basilisk, or WaterFox (another Firefox fork).
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
There are more than just two browsers on the market... I've been a quite satisfied Opera user for years now. Ad-block without an extension. VPN without an extension. The fact the majority of the web is now designed for Webkit/Blink first, and Mozilla's rendering engine is just an afterthought. Opera is pretty much the best of all worlds.
Google can track you just fine even if you are not using Chrome.
Just by knowing the four or five web sites you visit most is enough to ID you.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
I have no interest in the politics of which web browser to use. I use Safari, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox all the same time.
Safari for business browsing and other stuff. It is integrated best with MacOS naturally.
Edge when I have to do Windows stuff (in a VM) and it turns out to be a pretty good PDF viewer and some other interesting features.
Firefox when I am doing personal surfing and media playing. That way I keep my personal browser history separate from my business browser history. If I decide to wipe my personal browser history then I can do it and I don't lose the business history.
Chrome is best for JS debugging. It is really nice to be able to set breakpoints, single step, and inspect runtime state from inside the WebStorm IDE. Both Typescript and Javascript.
On top of that when I develop a web page or web app I use all of them to see how it looks in each and whether all the JS stuff works the same. That's the least I can do for my work, right?
I don't time to dither in browser wars.
If you use the internet you're already a victim of surveillance
FTFY
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
>"Just run the following performance test on Firefox and Chrome.
Whenever I look at benchmarks for the modern XXX vs. Firefox, they seem to be all over the map. In some specific benchmark tests, yes, XXX is X times faster than Firefox. But in others, Firefox is X times faster than XXX. What most people agree to is that with normal, general browsing, you can't really tell much of a difference in overall speed anymore.
By the way, I don't have Chrome, but I did compare Chromium to Firefox on that specific benchmark and had FAR worse results than you- 24 times slower! So yeah, they do need to work on whatever THAT is tickling! :)